Fiction vs History?

[aleach67 at mac.com]

On Oct 22, 2004, at 9:29 AM, jbor wrote:

>> 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
>
>


Historians have been consciously  wrestling with the problems of their 
craft -- among them the problems of sifting fact from fiction-- in the 
West since Herodotus. Neither Marx nor the post modernists invented the 
questions, though they have given us new perspectives and analytic 
tools to play with in answering them.

And why bother with the "good ones"  if  your goal in reading history 
is not discovering the truth about what happened? Bad history should be 
just as servicable, and can be much more entertainingly written. The 
idea that "history somehow presents 'the truth' " might indeed be 
pernicious if any historian ever believed it, but really the phrase is 
hardly even a useful strawman since the use of history here is as 
meaninglessly vague as "the truth".

One can acknowledge the difficulties of ascertaining the facts of past 
events (how many people died in the World Trade Center?), without 
insisting therefore that facts do not exist or that historians must be 
fabulists.