The Fiction of History

Alexander Lyon Macfie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317681731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

The Fiction of History sets out a number of themes in the relationship between history and fiction, emphasising the tensions and dilemmas created in this relationship and examining how various writers have dealt with these.

In the first part, two chapters discuss the philosophy behind the connection between fiction and history, whether history is fiction, and the distinction between the past and history. Part two goes on to discuss the relationship between history and literature using case studies such as Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens. Part three looks at television and film (as well as other media) through case studies such as the film Welcome to Sarajevo and Soviet and Australian films. Part four considers a particular theme that has prominence in both history and literature, postcolonial studies, focusing on the issues of fictions of nationhood and civilization and the historical novel in postcolonial contexts. Finally, the fifth section comprises two interviews with novelists Penelope Lively and Adam Thorpe and discusses the ways in which their works explore the nature of history itself.

Part I

Philosophy

1 History as fiction

The pragmatic truth

Jonathan Gorman

Said Richard J. Evans, “Such has been the power and influence of the postmodernist critique of history that growing numbers of historians themselves are abandoning the search for truth, the belief in objectivity, and the quest for a scientific approach to the past” (Evans 1997, 4). Some indeed are: Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth has explained in a detailed “personal history of intellectual development” the complex of postmodern sources that have impacted on her own attitudes and procedures as a historian (Ermarth 2001, 195). By contrast, Alexander Macfie has observed that “we conventional (realist) historians, [are] stuck in the old rut … , doomed to inhabit the old (nineteenth-century) paradigm” (Macfie 2013, 411). Such a historian sides with anti-postmodernists on the “question of truth: whether it is possible to tell the truth about what happened in the past, however inadequately, as Namier, A.J.P. Taylor and Elton generally suppose, or whether he is necessarily prejudiced and ideologically driven, as most of our postmodernists suppose” (Macfie 2013, 410). Beverley Southgate, Macfie noted, “concluded that postmodern theorists, working within a long tradition of sceptical philosophy, have argued irrefutably that all history is fictional, in the sense that it is a literary (rhetorical, aesthetic) construction based on evidence that is itself of inevitably questionable reliability” (Macfie’s emphasis, 2013, 404; Southgate 2009). And, “It is now surely a commonplace understanding (or am I being very naïve?) that apart from statements of justified belief history is a fictive enterprise,” said Alun Munslow (2013, 294).

Nor is it easy to see just where any distinctions between history and fiction may lie. Theorist of aesthetics David Davies noted comments made by Borges’ 1939 narrator on Cervantes’ Quixote and Menard’s Quixote, where “both texts contain the following passage: ‘truth, mother of history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor’” (Davies 2004, 65). A “contemporary of William James,” the historian Menard’s “final phrases” here are “brazenly pragmatic” (Davies 2004, 65, quoting Borges 1970, 69). But Menard is an imaginary historian, and perhaps “fictionality turns essentially on the author’s intention to invite imagining” (Currie et al. 2013, 1; Currie 1990). Yet that cannot be right; historians too normally invite our imagining as they present to us their object of historical thought; readers of history have to imagine what they read about, even if what they read about is not imaginary. Menard is then a fictional historian, perhaps; but that won’t do either, since the relation between history and fiction has problematic implications and “fictional” might no longer say what we want it to say here. Let us just say that there was no such person.

Other writers think history and fiction are clearly distinguishable. Walter Scott observed:

In life itself, many things befall every mortal, of which the individual never knows the real cause or origin; and were we to point out the most marked distinction between a real and a fictitious narrative, we would say that the former, in reference to the remote causes of the events it relates, is obscure, doubtful, and mysterious; whereas, in the latter case, it is a part of the author’s duty to afford satisfactory details upon the causes of the separate events he has recorded, and, in a word, to account for everything. The reader, like Mungo in the Padlock, will not be satisfied with hearing what he is not made fully to comprehend.

(Scott 1910, xi)

It is thus for Scott the reader’s judgement of what is “comprehensible” which determines the matter, with real historical narratives mysteriously obscure while good fictional narratives display better “marks of reality,” in that they transparently explain in a way that – ironically – suggests greater truth. Worse, counterfactual histories, known by both writers and readers to be deliberately false in that they are based on explicitly false assumptions, can nevertheless truly display what was historically possible if not what actually happened, while, on the other hand, many works of fiction truly describe real matters: the Cobb at Lyme Regis was surely truly described at the beginning of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles 1969).

Scott, a wit and historian if not a philosopher, would no doubt have approved of the remark widely attributed (but without a clear source) to the French diplomat and writer Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944): “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.” Truth and falsehood, perhaps like such “sincerity,” are for Scott to be distinguished in terms of the immediately comprehensible surface structure of the narrative. Is truth then faked, or is the right sort of appearance all there is to truth? Such worries reinforce the difficulties in distinguishing history from fiction. The major postmodern theorist of history Hayden White said, “Readers of histories and novels can hardly fail to be struck by their similarities. … Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another” (White 2000, 291). A historical narrative, even if it is poor quality fiction in terms of the lesser clarity of its explanations, is nevertheless a “literary artefact” like any work of fiction (White 2001). For White narrative is the central mode of historical “consciousness,” and opening many historical works displays their narrative form. Some historians are certainly masters of rhetorical persuasion, and White suggested that the language of poetics is required to express historical thought; he provided a detailed analysis which explained how and why (White 1973).

Does history need defending against the suggestion that it is “fiction”? Evans thought so because of the “dominance of hyper-relativism and scepticism about history’s validity as an intellectual enterprise amongst those who write about historiography and history as a discipline in a general, theoretical sense” (Evans 2000, 255); yet he was criticised for not engaging “directly with major postmodernist theorists such as Derrida or Baudrillard” (Evans 2000, 256). He sought instead to find a middle way between what he described as the “extremes of postmodernist hyper-relativism … and traditional historicist empiricism,” but it was against the former that he said the weight of the argument was directed (Evans 2000, 254–55), and his presentation of “empiricism” was limited; it is not clear why he thought “historicist empiricism” was an “extreme.” Was it just a rut? Evans made many scattered references to Hayden White, but, like many commentators, he missed an important point about White. “Hayden White is a literary theorist, not a philosopher,” he said (Evans 2000, 257), but that won’t do: apart from White’s major work Metahistory (1973) arguably being a philosophical analysis of historical writing (Gorman 2013b), White, while he drew on many influences, traced his own use of the relevant literary terms to the founder of pragmatism C.S. Peirce (White 2001, 227). It is pragmatic philosophy rather than French postmodernism which is missing in the debate about White’s postmodern approach, although pragmatism does have “more than a whiff of smoke-filled cafés on the banks of the Seine about it” (Weir 2006, 233). Pragmatic philosophy will also update and validate Macfie’s old empiricist rut.

The historical stance

Please allow me now to introduce myself: for the purposes of this essay, I am an analytical philosopher of history, and to say this is, in part, to locate myself in a particular philosophical tradition. Emphasising some temporal terminology, it is characteristic of traditions that they be identifiable, at least in part, in terms of matters in the past which, very roughly, have either continued in their original form; or can be appropriately seen as forerunners of later developments; or are adopted by later developments as endorsed ancestry. I will before very long outline the tradition of analytical philosophy suitably for a person not located in it, and later still show its essential relevance to the subject of this essay. However, there are many important preliminaries to be dealt with first. In mentioning a “tradition” I am preparing myself, and you, for the introduction of a new notion: that of a minimal historical stance in characterising our shared thinking (Bondì 2011; Gorman 2011). This is not a stance traditionally used by analytical philosophy.

In introducing myself, and this notion, I am beginning to contribute to a discourse with a reader whom I do not doubt is real but whom I can only imagine; and whom I imagine is likely to have an interest in historical theory, unlike many analytical philosophers (Gorman 2013b). As I write for you, I imagine possible critical responses, and I try to respond, although the textual product of my imagining will not take the grammatical form of questions and answers. It is this imaginary dialectical, even explanatory, nature of the thought behind it which makes it proper to think of this essay as a “discourse” – not, as we will see, a word which traditionally figured in the vocabulary of an analytical philosopher. Indeed, I am not now writing in the style of a traditional analytical philosopher. In beginning to describe how I imagine this ongoing discourse I am already deliberately adopting a temporal stance, for some of the things I am thinking about – a “tradition,” for example, as well as this ongoing discourse itself – have duration. I have to “observe” them mentally as having this enduring feature.

Objects of historical thought, of which traditions are one example, are among the sorts of things that take place over time. A “stance” in this context – historical or temporal – may also be understood as a point of view; so, here, a historical stance is the kind of point of view which is necessary in order to have as an object of thought a “tradition,” where a “tradition” is conceived as just one exemplar of a period of historical development; conceived, that is, as just one sort of thing of indeterminately longish duration that a historian might choose as subject matter, as an enduring object of historical thought. “Stance” is a word often suggestive of the physical position of one particular individual rather than another, while “point of view” often suggests something similar: “the spot from which I was observing things, what the Venetian masters who love perspective would call my ‘point of view’” (Pamuk 2001, 280; Belting 2011, 90ff). These concepts, when spatially used, are theoretically problematic, but they are used here, as they so often are, as metaphors, and metaphorical use enables many theoretical controversies to be sidestepped. Familiarly, we may share a (metaphorical) point of view or stance, and are invited to do so here. Space is only incidental to many temporal matters; nevertheless, it is normal to use spatial metaphors when making sense of time to ourselves. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood spoke for many when he said “We imagine time as a straight line along which something travels. Without inquiring too closely what it is that does the travelling, we may ask whether time is at all like a line; and, obviously, it is not” (Collingwood 1925, 143). Indeed, it is not; but that does not mean that we can easily avoid the use of spatial metaphors in describing it (Gorman 2012; Gorman 2013a).

A historical stance is a temporal stance, although not every temporal stance is a historical stance. The object of one’s thinking when one adopts a temporal stance may be something of very short as well as of very long duration, while a historical stance characteristically has as its object something which takes an indeterminately longish period, characteristically much longer than the period which an imagined discourse, such as the present essay expresses, will involve. However, there is no distinction of principle here. On the other hand, there is very much more to the notion of being “historical” than merely the length of time that a historical stance is concerned with. Here I will concentrate primarily on the temporal features of “historical,” which is why I have described the notion as a “minimal” historical stance. I will tend to use the expression “historical stance” rather than “temporal stance,” since the latter will for some philosophical readers hint at issues not of present relevance, while the word “historical” involves associations of familiar ideas which can ease the path of explanation.

There is, of course, much more that could be said about the nature and structure of “traditions,” but here we are using the notion for two things only: to help us attend to the idea of a historical stance, and to use that stance to locate a certain philosophical approach. The cast of mind required in adopting a historical stance is characteristically backward-looking, but such a cast of mind may well have a larger view – sometimes also allowed as “historical” – which looks to the present, or to the future, or both, as well as to the past. A historical stance is a view which has as its content a temporally extended subject matter. It is a cast of mind for which the many resources of tensed language are suitable, even though the past tense may seem to be the most appropriate. It is characteristically, if minimally, a historian’s stance, but it would be a complete misunderstanding to suppose that one has to be a historian to adopt it. On the contrary, it is an everyday stance appropriate to the experienced temporal continuity of our everyday lives and also to much of the fiction that we read and write, and it is plausibly our normal human mode: we may have to be educated, even trained, out of it if the objects of our thought are atemporal abstract matters instead, like mathematics or logic. We are made “looking before and after,” observed Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act IV, Scene IV), although we academic persons look “before and after many times as far” (Cornford 1973, 14); and Hamlet was right.

The analysis of language

Meaning and truth from a philosophical stance

Since Plato’s theory of Forms there have been many different philosophical traditions relating to the nature of language and how it is to be analysed, but not until the twentieth century did philosophers make explicit the centrality of the nature of language for their concerns. The familiar expression “the linguistic turn,” noticeable since Richard Rorty’s book of that title (1967), is ambiguous, for there continue to be many types of linguistic analysis. “We usually trace the intellectual genealogy of ‘the linguistic turn’ in historical theory back via Derrida and Barthes to Saussure,” said Nancy Partner (1998, 170), but “analytical” philosophy in the present context looks back to three different sources for the nature of the philosophical analysis of language: Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift of 1879 (Geach and Black 1966) initially by way of Bertrand Russell; Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with English translation in (1953); and one of Hayden White’s original sources: C.S. Peirce’s pragmatism, formulated in 1878 and in its early days of development promulgated by William James (Gallie 1966, 11). Among these, Frege’s approach was a clear example of the adoption of a stance which, like centuries of his predecessors, was not historical.

Frege and his followers adopted a philosophical stance which we can conceive as follows: it has as its content a subject matter which, in a sense to be explained, has no temporal extension. This philosophical cast of mind was one for which the many variations of tensed language are unsuitable, since on this approach philosophy works with universalities, necessities and possibilities where any temporal change is a sign of unreality and falsity. By convention, only a continuous present tense conceived as universally applicable was seen as appropriate. We can illustrate this with traditional paradigm cases of unchangeability: “2 + 2 = 4”; “‘bachelor’ means ‘unmarried man’.” These are sentences with respect to which there is no time at which they are false, it was standardly held; it is not that their truth lasts an indefinitely, or even infinitely, long time. They have no temporal extension in the sense that they are not subject to time and do not vary with it. They are – metaphorically – “always” what they are, even in imagined worlds outside time. Some might say that they “cannot” be false, and mathematical sentences in particular, if true, have often been seen by philosophers as necessarily true.

A philosophical stance is the kind of point of view which is required in order to have as its object such a time-independent truth although, just as not every object of a historical stance is a tradition, so not every object of a philosophical stance is a “necessary” truth. Logical reasoning is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Philosophy
• Part II Literature
• Part III Film
• Part IV Postcolonial studies
• Part V Interviews
• Index