Fiction vs History?

[jbor]

> Writing history off as fiction, blurring the lines
> between history and fiction is pernicious -- harmful;
> destructive.

This is bunkum. Historians select, arrange and interpret textual data, and
then represent it again, in much the same way that any writer of fiction
does. A historian engages with past times through various lenses --
economics, political and social movements, "everyday life", war, religion,
iconic figures, speculations about culture and mass psychology -- and they
combine and prioritise the stories they come up with about these various
aspects of "life" in a particular place and time in the form of an overall
narrative. Each of the stories which make up the overall narrative has also
been constructed via a similar process, from incidents, reports, statistical
data, anecdotal evidence etc.

Historians themselves -- good ones -- since the mid-nineteenth century have
recognised that the line between history and fiction is blurred. It's also a
recognition which has been a constant in Pynchon's work from V. to M&D. It's
the fallacious assumption that history somehow presents "the truth" which is
potentially pernicious, not the recognition that it doesn't.

best