Fiction vs History?

[jbor]

on 23/10/04 2:29 AM, jbor wrote:

>> Historians select, arrange and interpret textual data, and
>> then represent it again, in much the same way that any writer of fiction
>> does.

Or journalists, politicians, copywriters, children at school, people
chatting at the bus stop, on the Internet ...

There's nothing pernicious (destructive, ruinous, fatal) in pointing any of
this out, or in recognising, as any decent historian does, that claims to
historical "truth" (i.e. veracity, the notion that history can "simply show
how it really was") and historical "objectivity" (the ability somehow to
stand outside oneself) are fallacious, and noting that these claims were
pretty much dispensed with in the discipline over a century ago.

best

>> 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.

> History does more than recount events. That is mere chronology. Historians
> narrate: they impute cause(s) and effect(s) to events and knit it all together
> into a larger story which, invariably, conveys an impression of having a
> beginning, a middle, and an end.
> 
> On the other side of the coin, events and situations represented in fiction
> are often "historical", both in the sense that they are events that really
> happened and also in that the fiction reflects the culture and attitudes of
> its time (as also does written history). I'd argue that Jane Austen's novels
> present a richer and more authentic "slice of life" account of Georgian
> England than do Lewis Namier's histories. That is not to denigrate Namier's
> achievement in any way whatsoever.