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The Discipline of Fact/The Freedom of Fiction?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Richard King
Richard King
Affiliation:
Richard King isDepartment of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England.
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Extract

At a recent conference of historians, one of the few participants with a literary background confessed that he was surprised to hear such frequent and confident reference to “facts.” His reaction reflects the fact that contemporary literary theorists have become as wary of speaking of facts, (without inverted commas) as avant-garde theologians are of adverting to “God.” Indeed to critical theorists, most historians seem theoretical dolts; unlike Molière's famous character, they don't even realize they are talking (bad) theory all the time. Moreover to a novelist such as Gore Vidal, historians seem pettifoggers and without an imaginative bone in their body. Whatever else they are confident of, novelists automatically assume that they can do justice to the past with more verve and authenticity than historians.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , August 1991 , pp. 171 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Basic to this debate are works by White, Hayden, Metahistory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar and The Content of the Form (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar as well as Bann, Stephen, The Clothing of Clio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Barthes, Roland, “Historical Discourse,” in Lane, Michael (ed.), Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 145–55Google Scholar; Searle, John, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” New Literary History, 6 (1975), 319–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rorty, Richard, “Is There a Problem with Fictional Discourse?” Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 110–38Google Scholar; and more recently Habermas, Jürgen, “Excursus on Levelling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature,” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 185–210Google Scholar and Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some of the material in this essay is contained in King, Richard H., “History and Fiction,” Newsletter: Intellectual History Group, Spring, 1981, 7–13.Google Scholar

2 Doctorow, E. L., “False Documents,” Solotaroff, Theodore ed., American Review 26 (New York: Bantam, 1977), 215–32.Google Scholar

3 Rorty's concluding point in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” is precisely that modernism's privileging of the fictional and the imaginative assumes that there is something – the literal and the factual – to set them over and against. Or, in slightly different terms, Rorty has asserted, “No constructors, no deconstructors” in “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” (p. 108).Google Scholar

4 Cavell, Stanley, “Being Odd, Getting Even,” Salmagundi, 67 (1985), 112.Google Scholar

5 See Young, James, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)Google Scholar for an insightful application of recent literary theory to representations of the Holocaust. This distinction between relativism and nihilism or skepticism and that between epistemological and moral relativism is central to Peter Novick's book. It should be said that many deconstructors do often sound as though they are collapsing all these distinctions into one yawning aporia.

6 Compare Norris, , “Allegories of Disenchantment: Poetry and Politics in de Man's Early Essays,” Southern Review, 20 (1987), 215–39Google Scholar and “Paul de Man's Past,” London Review of Books, 4 02 1988, 7–11.Google Scholar

7 See “A Multiplicity of Witness: E. L. Doctorow at Heidelberg,” in Friedl, Herwig and Schulz, Dieter (eds.), E. L. Doctorow: A. Democracy of Perception (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1988)Google Scholar where Doctorow says, “I think history is made; it's composed. There is an objective event, but until it is construed, until it is evaluated, it does not exist as history” (184). With this position I have no argument.

8 White, , The Content of the Form, 57.Google Scholar

9 Megill, Allan, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 42. See Young's Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust for the Weiss example.Google Scholar

10 White, , The Content of the Form, 45Google Scholar or Tropics of Discourse, 121.Google Scholar

11 Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream, 601Google Scholar; Momigliano, Arnoldo, “The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White's Tropes,” Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, 3, ed. Shaffer, E. S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 264–66.Google Scholar

12 Both Bann, Stephen in The Clothing of ClioGoogle Scholar and Anchor, Robert, “Narrativity and the Transformation of Historical Consciousness,” Clio, 16 (1987), 121–37Google Scholar assert that the distinction between history and fiction is conventional but also no less important to maintain because of that. I take Habermas's point in “Excursus on Levelling the Genre Distinction…” about the different purposes of fiction and non-fiction in general, though I don't find his characterization of those purposes very interesting. But, again, this does not mean that these purposes are fixed once and for all.

13 Ash, Timothy Garton, “The Life of Death,” New York Review of Books, 19 12 1985, 39Google Scholar. Though a much less momentous issue, the case of Gore Vidal's Lincoln illustrates some of these same points. In his novel Vidal claims to have offered a new and fresh vision of the great martyr, which he claims is grounded in considerable historical research. The problem with Lincoln in Lincoln, however, is that Vidal's is a one-dimensional, sophomoric portrait and reveals Vidal's limitations as a novelist and as a reader of history. That Lincoln was a realist and consummate politician is no secret to any historian; but that he was much more as well seems to have remained a secret to Vidal.

14 See Dawidowicz, Lucy, The War against the Jews, 1933–45, Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Seth Press, 1986), xix–xxxiGoogle Scholar for an overview of revisionism, and her The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar for a discussion of the treatment of the Holocaust by historians in various countries. Maier's, CharlesThe Unmastered Past (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar is a thorough and lucid analysis of the recent Historikerstreit among West German historians and intellectuals over the nature and status of the Nazi period in German history and for contemporary German identity.

15 I have summarized and rephrased these from Vidal-Naquet, , “A Paper Eichmann,” Democracy, 1 (1981), 70–95.Google Scholar

16 Lyotard, Jean Franços, “The Differend, the Referent and the Proper Name,” Diacritics, 14 (1984), 4–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 White, , “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and Desublimation,” The Content of the Form, 55–83Google Scholar. For Doctorow's comments on Holocaust revisionism, see “A Multiplicity of Witness,” 189–90.Google Scholar

18 White, , “The Politics of Interpretation,” 64Google Scholar. The use of the term “discipline” echoes White's (and Foucault's) claim that the intellectual disciplines and the disciplines of power are crucially intertwined and that a discipline exerts a “discipline” upon its members, though not in most cases as stringent or serious as state discipline.

19 In That Noble Dream, 1–3Google Scholar Novick defines the ideal of objectivity in similar terms. It involves a commitment to the reality of the past, to the correspondence theory of truth, to the separation of fact and value and to the clear difference between history and fiction. The historian is a “neutral or disinterested judge.” Thus Novick's objectivity/relativism distinction bears a certain resemblance to, though it is not identical with, White's history/memory and discipline/sublimity distinctions.