"Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in." ~Hayden White, "Fictions of Factual Representation," page 122.
When I looked back at the first entry in my notebook about the differences between history and fiction, I think that I wasn't so far off, at least at a basic level. History and fiction do have a lot in common, especially the element of narrative and piecing together a story from either fragments of facts or figments of the imagination paired with facts.
But a month into the class, I also have a change I might make. Maybe it is the influence of all the postmodernist essays we've been reading, or maybe it is my own partly postmodernist mindset (not like I consciously have aligned myself with postmodernism but because I think I, like most people in my generation, have grown up in a world that has been strongly influenced and infiltrated by postmodernist ideas).
But whatever the origin, I think I would make one significant change to my original thoughts. I would now be more willing to say that history is narrative and stories that we believe happen, where with a novel we know what happens originates at least partly in the author's imagination. I think this accounts for the claim that all history is "made up" in the sense that someone chooses which details to include, which version of events "must" be right.
And that is where White's quotation really makes sense. He is right, if you just look at a novel and a history they are impossible to tell apart simply by the language. If you only consider the works themselves, than there is no difference between history and fiction.
But if you take the reader's perceptions into account, then you have to say there is a difference between history and fiction because we perceive them differently.
When you say "history" I automatically think "true, fact, what actually happened." When you say "fiction" my brain thinks "the made-up stories in the library, novels, imaginary." Those are my preconceptions about what each type of book is supposed to be; so if you hand me a novel I don't assume what goes on actually happened, and if you hand me a history textbook I believe that what I will read is true.
As a person who grew up in a postmodernist influenced world, I do have a nagging sense of doubt about the absolute truth of history and I am open to the idea that fiction and history are have much more in common that I usually acknowledge. But I am not ready to say that there is no difference between them because I think that as long as people read them with different assumptions, the two genres will be different.
1 comment:
For these same reasons, I'm always interested in thinking about how we "take" a movie (narrative, acted, not "documentary") that explicitly announces that it is "based on a true story." That "based" offers a LOT of wiggle room, as the Coen brothers demonstrate with _Fargo_ (which is only VERY loosely based on a single newspaper clipping one of them randomly came across--ALL of the major plot and character details are invented). But a movie that carefully tries to establish its "historicity" (re-creating a "historic" battle, for example; giving dates and times as titles; actors portraying familiar historical figures; etc.) I think *is* "taken" differently by a viewer.
By the same token, what if a traditional, documented historical narrative were to announce itself as a "novel"? Would the reader then hold its insights at arm's length, or read with increased skepticism?
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