1 - Histories

Summary

Just as narratologists have recently made much of the fundamental distinction between the events that are supposed to have occurred in a story and the narrative that relates them (histoire and récit in Genette's terminology), historiographers have long since distinguished between, on the one hand, history as the happenings of the past and, on the other hand, accounts that have been or could be produced to relate those happenings. Hegel referred respectively to res gestae and historia rerum gestarum, while other Germans later – and more economically – differentiated between Geschichte and Historie. Italians, after Croce, contrasted storia and storiografia, while a French translator of Heidegger, Henry Corbin, was even more economical in distinguishing between Histoire and histoires. In the actual practice of history writing, so it seems, this fundamental distinction is more complex and far from absolute. As Walter L. Reed points out: ‘The referential gap between history-as-account and history-as-events [rather] has become the mechanism for a history interminable, as newly identified events have demanded newly constructed accounts and old accounts (like Hegel's Philosophy of History) have themselves acquired the status of events that need accounting for.’ In the field of literary history there is the same complication, in kind if not in degree, with the added problem that literature itself is largely composed of accounts, stories, histoires.