- 24 May 2008 17:05
#1538315
This is remarkably naive. It may be true that most historians throughout time have had the goal of telling it like it really was. But the fact that they had this motive is not very interesting. A desire to show 'wie es eigentlich gewen ist' does not amount to being able to do so. Language is not a mirror which reflects the world: it is oblique, artificial and often ideological. In the very act of using language we loose the ability to depict 'truth' (if we ever had it or indeed if there is such a thing as 'truth').
Then there is the problem of narrative. Narrative in its very structure conveys a morality, a particular message:
Hayden White: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (p.14)
Because:
ibid. p.16
The very inclusion of the event into the narrative is done on the basis of a subject chosen by the historian in advance as his object of study. The choice of subject will invariably be ideological. They will make the choice because they have something they want to say on it or because they think it will make an interesting story or because they want to sell lots of books in order to make money. And that choice of subject will inform the choice of event chosen to go into the narrative. You have to choose your events of course: it would simply be impossible to include every single event happening around you. This is the problem that also fundamentally undermines the premise of the realist novel: no narrative depiction can capture the infinite complexity of the world around us. If we attempted to do so, it would become a boring list of objects and even then it would still not necessarily correspond with the world as it really is because of the problem of language. A world view is always implicit (and sometimes explicit) in any attempt to depict history as it really is.
I think I am simply repeating galactus and so I will not go any further. But I would emphasise that history and literature are not opposites: they are almost one and the same. The only difference in historiography is that you are compelled to a certain extent to report on documents from the archive (the source of virtually all our historical knowledge). Historical facts are usually just the results of intertextuality.
The tradition of Herodotus, Thucidides, Plutarch and the whole legacy of historical methodology, have one objective, and are driven by one motive, and their success on it is irrelevant:
"to show wie es eigentlich gewesen ist".
This is remarkably naive. It may be true that most historians throughout time have had the goal of telling it like it really was. But the fact that they had this motive is not very interesting. A desire to show 'wie es eigentlich gewen ist' does not amount to being able to do so. Language is not a mirror which reflects the world: it is oblique, artificial and often ideological. In the very act of using language we loose the ability to depict 'truth' (if we ever had it or indeed if there is such a thing as 'truth').
Then there is the problem of narrative. Narrative in its very structure conveys a morality, a particular message:
Hayden White: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (p.14)
Narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralise reality, that is to identify it with the social system that it is the source of any morality that we can imagine
Because:
ibid. p.16
The capacity to envision a set of events as belonging to the same order of meaning [the narrative] requires some metaphysical principle by which to translate difference into similarity. In other words, it requires a 'subject' common to all of the referents of the various sentences that register events as having occurred.
The very inclusion of the event into the narrative is done on the basis of a subject chosen by the historian in advance as his object of study. The choice of subject will invariably be ideological. They will make the choice because they have something they want to say on it or because they think it will make an interesting story or because they want to sell lots of books in order to make money. And that choice of subject will inform the choice of event chosen to go into the narrative. You have to choose your events of course: it would simply be impossible to include every single event happening around you. This is the problem that also fundamentally undermines the premise of the realist novel: no narrative depiction can capture the infinite complexity of the world around us. If we attempted to do so, it would become a boring list of objects and even then it would still not necessarily correspond with the world as it really is because of the problem of language. A world view is always implicit (and sometimes explicit) in any attempt to depict history as it really is.
I think I am simply repeating galactus and so I will not go any further. But I would emphasise that history and literature are not opposites: they are almost one and the same. The only difference in historiography is that you are compelled to a certain extent to report on documents from the archive (the source of virtually all our historical knowledge). Historical facts are usually just the results of intertextuality.