Fiction vs History?

[Dave Monroe]

See, e.g., ...

White, Hayden.  Metahistory: The Historical
   Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
   Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/1977.html

And keep going, e.g., ...

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/hayden_white.html

http://www.fgcu.edu/cas/History/hist_bib.html

http://www.untimelypast.org/bibtxt.html

Very good.  Looks like it took The Jolly One to get
the rest of us to at least temporarily bury our
hatchets (though be forewarned I was careful to wrap
mine against the elements in anticipation of possible
need for future retrieval ...).  However, perhaps
history--or, more properly,
historiography--nonetheless--and both rightly and
necessarily--falls under certain standards that
fiction does not.  That Popperian falsifiability,
perhaps.  For example ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

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