Fiction vs History?

[Otto]

>
>
> >> 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.
>

"to play with" -- interesting formulation. Nobody has claimed that the
postmodernists have invented theses questions. And Marx? The people
who had claimed to have turned Marx' ideas into reality, the Soviets under
Stalin and his successors, had a just as fixed idea of determined history as
the
nazis and they all share the same kind of infallible belief in (historical)
faith
with George W. Bush.

> 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.

Indeed, because mostly there are no straight facts, but mostly
interpretations of the things regarded as facts and every source has to be
evaluated. I've read many historians, but I try not to waste my time with
the bad ones. I can recommend William L. Shirer, Barbara Tuchmann, Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen, A.L. Morton, Eric J. Hobsbawm, C. V. Wedgwood, Johan
Huizinga, Georges Duby, Dan Diner, Golo Mann and Arno Borst for example.

On the "beerhall putsch" one shouldn't only read Shirer but Klaus
Theweleit's
"Male Fantasies" too.

> 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".
>

The use of history is mostly determined by some ideological/economical
purposes.

> 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.
>

More important than the body count seems to me is who did it, who did let
it happen and who, in the end, was really responsible that it did happen.

And I'm sure we will never get the whole truth of it, all of the so-called
facts, because that's impossible.

Historians will avoid many errors if they admit (to themselves) that they
are mainly storytellers.

Otto