Fact or fiction, it's all reporting on the human condition:
The historian and the novelist both work to deconstruct the aggregate fictions of their societies. The scholarship of the historian does this incrementally, the novelist more abruptly, from his unforgivable (but exciting) transgressions, as he writes his way in and around and under the historian's work, animating it with the words that turn into the flesh and blood of living, feeling people.
Monday, July 24, 2006
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3 comments:
Hmmmm...many thoughts, but here, for now, just a question.
What do you think, MFT, as a student and writer on history, of you being cast as the land bound incrementalist while the honor [and presumably the dame] goes to those daring young fictionalists in their flying machines?
With each year of grad-school, the cynicism strengthens. When it's at its worst, I'm tempted to say, "My only cast is to write and re-write in the active voice."
...I'll wait until my internal glass becomes half-full before commenting any further (this may only take a matter of hours; certainly no longer than a day).
I thought this was a rather important point; David Hume and Edward Gibbon, afterall, were the predecessors to the eventual professionalization of history (at least as I argue, both in the Enlightenment "revisionist" sense; and also keep on eye on how well they footnote, either in Hume's History of England or in Gibbon's the Decline and Fall). Leopold von Ranke took it to new extremes -- I think he's been quoted as saying the archives were his only mistress. Hume and Gibbon were not wrong to revise the past, and they sure pissed off quite a few religious folk. Because cultures evolve, so too will a nation's perspective on their past.
Excerpt with more commentary below: The scholarly historian and the undocumented novelist make common cause as operatives of the Enlightenment. They are confronted with faux history as it is construed by power, as it is perverted for political purposes, as it is hammered into serviceable myth by those who take advantage of its plasticity. For “History,” of course, is not only an academic study. It is, at all times, in all places, hot. “Who controls the past controls the future,” Orwell says in 1984. So there is history as written by elected or nonelected political leaders, super-patriots, dirty tricksters, xenophobes, and all other exemplars of shrewdly reductive thinking [still, we can gleen information from their partisan interpretation]; history as written by ideologically driven social theorists, textbook writers conforming their work to communal pressures, retired statesmen putting the best face on their lamentable accomplishments, and fervent acolytes of one religious cult or another.
The historian, if he or she wants to do good history, isn't free to construct a story from the whim of a thought. The daring young fictionalist, however, often has more influence amongst contemporary society (see Dan Brown for example) than a historian who's looking for ways to convince that same public that the past is important.
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