Fiction vs History?

[Joel Katz]

you're missing the point.  the fictional element in almost all 'history' 
comes from the fact that history itself never really happens--but is a 
zero-sum game between competing ideologies.  and of course the dominant one 
always leave a bigger estate.  whereas art has the advantage of being 
tactile to its period, it openly wears it ideological imprint on its 
sleeve--so that both its truth and lies alike are always a more reliable 
indicator of what was, in fact, going on.

this is why the best histories i've seen are reverse-engineered from 
particular works of art back to social context--and include the conditions 
and reception of particular artworks, how they were used and abused, and 
what, if anything, they sought to transcend.  only art has the appropriate 
distance to judge history (this is why it has either been tabooed as 
religion or myth, or neutralized as culture).  and this is why the only real 
history is the history of ideology.

on another note:  water- or silicon-based?  opinions?



>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
>

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