Comments on: From historiography to history to literature http://digitalovertone.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Comments+on+Articles+%28RSS2%29&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fdigitalovertone.com%2Farchives%2F84%2Ffrom-historiography-to-history-to-literature%2F%23comment-&seed_title=From+historiography+to+history+to+literature Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:24:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 By: Gavin http://digitalovertone.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Comments+on+Articles+%28RSS2%29&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fdigitalovertone.com%2Farchives%2F84%2Ffrom-historiography-to-history-to-literature%2F%23comment-9&seed_title=From+historiography+to+history+to+literature#comment-9 Gavin Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:46:12 +0000 http://digitalovertone.com/archives/84/84/#comment-9 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. 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.

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