history and literature : theoretical...

CHAPTER–I

HISTORY AND LITERATURE : THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

I

History is ‘an unending dialogue’ between the present and the past, a dialogue

between the events of the past and progressively emerging future ends. The

historian's interpretation of the past, his selection of the significant and relevant,

evolves with the progressive emergence of new goals. In fact, history can be written

only by those who find and accept ‘a sense of direction’ in history itself. The belief

that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are

going somewhere. History, therefore, acquires meaning and objectivity only when it

establishes a coherent relation between past and future.1 History is the living past of

man. It is an attempt made by man through centuries to reconstruct, describe and

interpret his own past. History is collective memory, the storehouse of experience

through which people develop a sense of their social identity and their future

prospects.2 History is a kind of research or inquiry. Since, science is finding things

out and in that sense history is a science.3

The word history has two generally accepted meanings as it refers to history

as event or as record. The two uses of the words may be combined, as in the

definition of history ‘the bridge between the past and the present’.4 History is the

past experience of mankind. More exactly, history is the memory of past experience

as it has been preserved largely in written records. However, at the practical level,

history is the product of historian’s work in reconstructing the flow of events from

the original written traces or sources into narrative account.5 It is the understanding

1 E.H. Carr, What is History?, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1987, pp. 123, 130, 132. 2 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History : Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of

Modern History, Longman, London, 1984, p. 1. 3 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, OUP, London, 1953, p. 9. 4 John C.B. Webster, An Introduction to History, Macmillan, London, 1981, p. 14. 5 Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 14, International Edition, Grolier, Connecticut, 1999, pp.

226-227.

History and Literature

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of what had happened, on the basis of what present standpoints indicate. To exist is

to change, to change is to mature and to mature is to advance and make progress.

Thus, history becomes a barometer to estimate and record this progress of mankind.

It indicates the growth of human mind in which the unique facts of life are

collected, classified and interpreted in a scientific way.6

The problem of designation of history as an intellectual pursuit was first

articulated during the renaissance. The historical achievements of the renaissance

were built upon classical and medieval foundations. But it was only in the 15th

century that the attitude of mind which we call 'historical' assumed a nodal place in

the history of western civilization.7 However, study of history really began only in

the 19th century, because only then did historians absorb the lessons of

antiquarians.8 History, as we know it today, is a developed branch of learning with

its own methods, techniques of research and standards.9 The modern historians aim

to reconstruct a record of human activities and to achieve a more profound

understanding of them.10 Thought becomes central in historical activity. Every

experience as such is not the object of historical knowledge. Historian and his object

must be bridged through a kind of thought which establishes a direct link between

historian’s mind and the object of his study.11 History treats fundamentally, the

transformation of things (people, institutions, ideas and so on) from one stage into

another, and the event is its concern as well as its instrument of narrative and

understanding.12 It is an integrated narrative, description or analysis of past events

6 B.Sheik Ali, History: Its Theory and Method, MacMillian, Madras, 1970, p. 3. 7 B.A. Haddock, An Introduction to Historical Thought, Edward Arnold, London, 1980,

102. 8 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, Collins-Fontana, Glasgow, 1978, p.13. 9 W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Hutchison Co. Ltd., London,

1979, p.12. 10 The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 2, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., Chicago, 1997,

p. 559. 11 B.Sheik Ali, History: Its Theory and Method, pp. 31-32. 12 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, p. 23.


3

or facts written in a spirit of critical enquiry for the whole truth.13 The subject of

history gives perspective. Similarly, it is a mountain top of human knowledge from

whence the doings of one generation may be scanned and fitted into proper

dimension.14 Thus, history is story of experiences of men living in civilized

societies as well as the societies before the process of civilization, as we know it

started.15 The study of history is a personal pursuit which at most enables the

individual to achieve some self - awareness by stepping outside his or her

immediate experience.16

History is a source of inspiration as it holds up to us the tradition and glory,

the clashing passions and heroic exploits of past generations. In it, we find the

‘drama of real life’.17 Men of ideas and letters have perceived history in different

incarnations. Hegel considers history as 'the history of liberty' which becomes, on

the one hand, the explanatory principles of the course of history and on the other,

the moral ideal of humanity.18 For T.B. Macaulay, history being the part of

literature, "begins in novel and ends in essay.”19 History has also been referred to as

‘biography’,20 ‘a national epic’,21 ‘a science’22, and ‘progress’23. Biography, history

13 Allen Nevins, The Gateway to History, Vora and Company, Bombay, 1968, p. 39. 14 Carl G. Gustavson, A Preface to History, McGraw Hill, New York, 1955, p. 2. 15 G.J. Reiner, History: Its Purpose and Method, Allen and Unwin, London, 1959, p. 13. 16 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, p. 18. 17 Robert V. Daniels, Studying History : How and Why, Prentice-Hall, Engle Wood Cliffs,

New Jersey, 1966, p. 6. 18 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, George Allen and Unwin, London,

1941, p. 59. 19 T.B. Macaulay, "History" F. Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History, Macmillan, London,

1970, p. 73. 20 Thomas Carlyle, "On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History", F. Stern (ed.),

The Varieties of History, pp. 101-07. 21 Jules Michelet, "The People", F. Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History, 108-19. 22 J. Bury, "The Science of History", F. Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History, pp. 209-26;

R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 9. 23 E.H. Carr, What is History?, 132.


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and society are the three coordinate points of proper study of man.24 Hence, its uses

are ‘almost endless’.25 Furthermore, history is 'for human self-knowledge.’ 26 It is

undeniable that a science will always seem to us somehow incomplete if it can not

aid us in living better. This sentiment is more forceful as regards history. So it is

much more clearly destined to work for the profit of man, in that it has man himself

and his actions for its theme.27 The purpose of historian is to study, elucidate and

demonstrate the historical process. At the same time, he is bound to have had a

purpose in mind when he enters upon his studies. Historians cannot exist in a

vacuum. They live in the society of men and influence it, whether they like it or not.

A good historian must question his own faith and admit some virtue in the beliefs of

others.28 To enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his

mastery over the society of the present is "the dual function" of history.29 No one

reads or writes history in a fit of total absent-mindedness.30 W.H. Walsh declared

that it is a major function of history to make men aware of character of their time by

seeing it in comparison and contrast with another.31 A discipline so close to human

life cannot remain fixed; it changes with time, with the impact of new hopes,

thoughts and ideas.32 One cannot fully understand or appreciate the work of the

historian unless one grasps the standpoint from which historian himself has

approached it, and that standpoint is itself rooted in a social and historical

background. Thus, in order to understand the history one must understand the

historian and the age in which he lives, for herein lies the immediate objective of

24 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Penguin, Middlesex 1980, p. 159. 25 Allen Nevins, The Gateway to History, p. 13. 26 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 10. 27 Marc Bloch, The Historian 's Craft, Vintage Books, New York, 1953, pp. 10-11. 28 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, pp.56, 59, 60. 29 E.H. Carr, What is History?, p. 55. 30 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, p. 56. 31 Cited in Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History, MacMillan, London, 1976, p. 17. 32 Fritz Stern (Ed.), The Varieties of History, p. 24.


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studying history.33 Historian aims at an intelligent reconstruction of the past.34

Historians are not concerned with the discovery of universal laws or theories from

which predictions can be derived; their primary purpose is to determine what

happened in the past and why.35 In this way, history can play a powerful role in the

enlightenment of men and in the creation of rational and a human society.36

The British historians including H.A.L. Fisher, declare that there is no

‘general pattern’ in history at all.37 E.H. Carr is surely right in denouncing the

theory of accident, which believes that history is just, 'one damn thing after another.'

Accidents may affect the course of events, but the historian, in his analysis, must

not be accident-prone. One can indeed say that historian has never treated his

subject as though it were entirely without meaning. If he had, he would have been

unable to write. What is really at issue is whether one may discern a large purpose

and whether things produce effects that are continuous that too upto a point,

predictable.38 History is 'critical thinking about the past’,39 and 'the science of man

in time', which implies totality of human experience.40

The task of history is to understand the past as many people want to know

about the past; though many people simply want to know about the past for

emotional or intellectual satisfaction.41 History without predicting the future, can

offer some useful guide to it.42 Historical knowledge gives a prevision, an insight to

33 John C.B. Webster, An Introduction to History, p. 26. 34 W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 31. 35 Petrick Gardener, “History”, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Vol. 6,

Macmillan, New York, 1968, p. 430. 36 Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History, p. 35. 37 E.H. Carr, What is History?, p. 43. 38 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, p. 57. 39 Peter Gray and G.J. Cavanaugh, “General Introduction : A Definition of History”,

Historians at Work, Vol. I, Harper & Row, New York, 1953, p. 27. 40 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, p. 27. 41 G. R. Elton, The Practice of History, pp. 66, 67. 42 A.L. Rowse, The Use of History, The English Universities Press Ltd., London, 1946,

p.22.


6

the understanding of future.43 It is the human past which is the primary object of the

historical study. As mentioned history as a discipline does involve significant rather

than plain narrative of the past experience of human beings. The historian is not

contended to tell us merely what happened. He wishes to make us see why it

happened.44 The task of history is to understand the past, and if the past is to be

understood, it must be given full respect in its own right.45 The study of history is an

intellectual pursuit, an activity of reasoning mind, and, as one should expect, its

main service lies in its essence.46 It is a subject that rids one off illusion and enables

one to grow and become mature. Of course, all may not agree. For instance, Hegel

said, “the one thing one learns from history is that nobody ever learns from

history”.47 History enables a person to see himself as part of that living process of

human growth which has emerged out of past and will inexorably project itself out

beyond one’s own life time.48 The value of a historian lies in solving as many

controversies relating to past as possible, and in throwing as powerful flood of light

as he can. A historian would be faulting in his duty if he is indifferent in drawing

proper conclusions.49

History and the social sciences share common aims. They claim to deal, at

least in principle, with the whole range of social life and its purpose which leads to

a comprehensive understanding of human actions and relationships.50 Thus, to

enable man to understand the society of the past, and to increase one’s mastery over

the society of the present, is the dual functions of history.51 The past is intelligible

to us only in the light of the present and we can fully understand the present only in

43 G. R. Elton, The Practice of History, pp. 67. 44 W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 33. 45 G. R. Elton, The Practice of History, pp. 66. 46 Ibid., p. 68. 47 Cited in A. L. Rowse, The Use of History, p. 22. 48 Carl G.Gustavson, A Preface to History, p.2. 49 B. Sheik Ali, History: Its Theory and Method, pp. 13, 14. 50 Geoffery Barraclough, “History”, p.273. 51 E.H. Carr, What is History?, p.55.


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the light of the past.52 A nation that forgets history will have no future. Lord Acton

said, “If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, the knowledge of the past is the

surest and safest emancipation”.53 History has become a meeting ground for various

disciplines, which is why, at its best, it has turned into such a fascinating subject.54

It includes both nature and humanity in their changing - either growth or declining -

phases. It has all ingredients of science, art and philosophy, all rolled into one, thus

becoming a meeting ground of all the three fundamental branches of knowledge.55

Thus, the domain of history has become vast and comprehensive.

For the reconstruction of the past, the historian employs a variety of sources -

primary and secondary - such as records, documents in archives, eyewitness reports,

recollections, diaries, letters, newspapers, archaeological remains, folklores and

popular literature.56 According to Thucidydes, "History is only equal to its

evidence"57 because history deals with evidence, so it is important for the historian

that he must be clear about his attitude towards the sources from which his evidence

is drawn.58 History has mainly two functions to perform. One is to offer broad

principles and generalizations of historical truth. The other is to combine the merits

of drama or epic poetry with the merit of truth.59 G.M Trevelyan has remarked : "All

history is a matter of opinion based on facts; of opinion guided and limited by facts

that have been scientifically discovered".60 Thus, history concerns itself with some

but not all of the facts of human life; and on the other hand, besides recording facts,

history also has source of fiction and makes use of laws.61 The reconstruction of

52 Ibid., p. 55. 53 B. Sheik Ali, History: Its Theory and Method, pp. 22, 23. 54 Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History, p. 18. 55 B. Sheik Ali, History: Its Theory and Method, p.8. 56 Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 14, p. 227. 57 Cited in G. R. Elton, The Practice of History, p.24. 58 John C.B. Webster, An Introduction to History, p. 20. 59 B. Sheik Ali, History: Its Theory and Method, p. 22. 60 Quoted in Dharmendra Goel, Philosophy of History, p.25. 61 Hans Meyerhoff, The Philosophy of History in the Time, A Critical Study of Recent

Philosophies of History, Sterling, New Delhi, 1967, p.115.


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past in the historian's mind is dependent on empirical evidence.62 History is about

the process of translating evidence into facts. Facts are literally meaningless in their

unprocessed state of simple evidential statement. The evidence is turned into facts

through the narrative interpretations of historian.63 The question of evidence is very

much central to the study of past. Just as studying historian is necessary to study

history, knowledge about the nature of evidence is also very important for the study.

“The evidence of past is processed through inference, with the historian

constructing a meaning by employing categories of analysis supposedly determined

by the nature of evidence".64 The historian and the facts of the history are necessary

to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts

without their historian are dead and meaningless.65

History is not merely a story telling. It is one of the foundational social

sciences and it is both science and art. As far as the presentation of fact is concerned

it is an art, whereas the operational methods of history make it a science. Today the

historian is not working only as a chronicler, rather he is pursuing the discipline of

history as an interpretative one and making it a broad and inclusive study.

Moreover, the historian is tending to incorporate the alternative sources as evidence

for the past other than the traditional sources like archival records and

archaeological remains.

II

The word literature simply means a body of published texts. In a more restrictive

sense, it alludes to creative works of imagination. Conventionally, these are divided

into poetry, drama and fiction. This concept of literature is relatively a recent one,

first used in the late eighteenth century.66 Among the varied historical and

contemporary definitions of literature, the broadest, perhaps, is "anything that 62 E.H.Carr, What is History?, p. 22. 63 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, Routledge, London, 2006, (Second Edition),

p. 7. 64 Ibid., p. 8. 65 E. H. Carr, What is History?, p. 35. 66 International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, (2nd Edition), Thomas Gale, Detroit,

Vol.IV, 2008, p. 462.


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appears in print". Besides the generalizing use, literature has borne the weight of

cultural values. The most specific definition conceives of literature as 'imaginative'

writing in the sense of not being literally true.67 According to the Oxford English

Dictionary, "literature means literary productions as a whole, the body of writings

produced in a particular country or period or in the world in general. Now in a more

restricted sense, it is applied to writing which has claim to consideration on ground

of beauty of form of emotional effect".68 Literature is not a single entity which can

be defined by listing a fixed set of criteria; it is rather a cultural category to which a

whole range of characteristics has been attributed. Literature should not be regarded

as a class at all, but as an aggregate. It is not what literary works have in common,

but constitutes, rather, the cultural object of which they are parts.69

Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because both

of its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical value that inheres in

special treatise for specialists.70 What has to be traced is the attempted and often

successful specialization of literature to certain kinds of writing. There has been a

specialization to a sense which is sometimes emphasized in phrases like creative

literature and imaginative literature. Clearly, the major shift represented by the

modern complex of literature - art, aesthetic, creative and imaginative - is a matter

of social and cultural history.71

Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in

words even when organized and written down, is counted as literature. Although the

derivation of word literature implies writing, there also exists a large proportion of

oral literature.72 Literature becomes a form of universal truth articulated through

67 The Encyclopedia Americana, International Edition, Vol. 23, Grolier, Danbury, 1999,

p.559. 68 The Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, London, Vol. II, 1989, p.1029. 69 Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, Routledge, London, 2004,p.12. 70 Theodore Roosevelt, "History as Literature", The American Historical Review, Vol. 18,

No. 3, 1913, p.475. 71 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Flamingo, London,

1983, pp. 185-186. 72 The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol.23 , Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., Chicage, 1997,

p.77.


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powerful personal expression.73 In general sense, literature includes creative

writings (poetry, fiction, drama, essays), popular narratives and works produced by

philosophers, historians, religious and social thinkers, travellers, and nature

writers.74 In more restricted sense of imaginative literature, the definition alludes to

what in French is called belles letters or 'fine writing'. Imaginative literature can be

defined by its fictional and autotelic nature, the dominance of aesthetic function

within it and its special use of language.75 Thus, to define literature is a difficult

task. Theorists have wrestled with it but without notable success. The reasons are

not far to seek, for works of literature come in all shapes and sizes and most of them

seem to have more in common with the works that are not usually called literature

than they do with some other works recognized as literature.76 The word literature

tends to be used with approval of works perceived as having artistic merit, the

evaluation of which may depend on social and linguistic as well as aesthetic

factors.77 Literature is nothing but ideology in a certain artistic form and the work of

literature are just expressions of ideologies of their time.78 It is a non-instrumental

language whose value resides in itself alone and it is an expression for the sake of

expression.79

Literature is creative counterpart of history. Literary writing, as a creative

index of history as lived experience of the past, possesses significant interlinkage

with the present. It is both compelling and challenging for a creative writer to

assimilate critically the legacy of history, as a reference point for the present as well

73 The Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 23, p.559. 74 International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Vol. IV, p.463. 75 Ibid., p. 463. 76 Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, OUP, New Delhi, 2006,

(First Published 1997), p. 20. 77 Peter Widdowson, Literature, Routledge, London, 2007, p.12. 78 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Routledge, London, 2003, (First

Published 1976), p. 16. 79 Tzvetan Todorov et al, "The Notion of Literature", New Literary History, Vol.5, No. 1,

1973, p.9.


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as to re-interpret and 're-enact the past experience'.80 The true significance of

historical literature lies in its aesthetic interpretation of salient historical and socio-

political themes. However, the traditional historical methodology does not recognize

the literary genres as evidence for the reconstruction of the past and perceive them

as bearing the imprints of bias. There was a time when historians thought that they

had escaped 'merely literary' by establishing historical studies on the solid

foundation of objective method and rational argument. But recent developments in

literary criticism and philosophy of language have undermined that confidence and

literature has returned to history.81 Literature is seen not as a (passive) reflection of

historical change, but as a significant (active) vehicle of it. Indeed, literary

approaches are profoundly shaping the contemporary practice of history.82

The historians in their professional zeal for objectivity and accuracy often

neglect literature and belittle its importance in capturing the historical reality. They

argue that literature is based on the imagination of human mind. But the human

imagination is conditioned by social reality and socio-political forces. Moreover,

literature is not written in vacuum. E.H. Carr has aptly remarked, “literature like

history is influenced or moulded by the social environment”.83 It is a vital record of

what people have observed and what they experienced. If a historian is to

reconstruct a realistic picture of the past, literature can be one of the authentic

sources. The difference between a historical and fictional account of the world is

formal and not substantive. It resides in the relative weighs given to the constructive

elements in them.84 The critical analysis of literature proves if a writer is deeply

80 Asha Kaushik, “Partition of India: Response of Indian Novelists in English”, S.R.

Chakravarty and Mazhar Hussain(eds.), Partition of India: Literary Responses, Har-Anand, New Delhi, 1993, p. 39.

81 David Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 94, No. 3, 1989, p. 581.

82 Ludmilla Jordanova, Practice of History, Hodder Arnold, New York, 2006, p. 78. 83 E.H. Carr, What is History?, p. 174. 84 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, John Hopkins

University Press, Baltimone, 1990 (First Publisher 1978), p. 58.


12

rooted in the popular life and if his writing stems out of this intimacy, he can plumb

the real depths of historical truth.85

The literature goes beyond the empirical reality, beyond treaties and wars

and probes the silence of the human mind. Going beyond the seen and the

observable, it approaches the question of ontological existence, of belonging, of

relating to others, of guilt and remorse. It goes on to tap the unconscious and the

irrational as it catches the fragmentary realities.86 As literature transcends the

historicity, the appeal is far reaching and the experience becomes universal. It deals

with complexities and inner workings of the human mind, thereby making the study

more nuanced one. The human experience of joy and suffering is an indispensable

part of literature. Moreover, certain human situations need to be dramatized for a

better understanding of human experience of the tragedy. Hence, powerful

relationships between history and literature have been and are being revealed by the

critics. Literary critics are now studying theories of history; and professional

historians seem to be searching freshly for the unique insights a literary document

may elicit.87

The historians should treat the literature seriously. The literary texts offer

important and sometimes unique kinds of historical evidence. But the historical

discipline has been curiously diffident about exploiting this evidence with vigour

and confidence. The literature and history question has maintained a certain urgency

in the agenda of literary studies and it has often been debated in a polemical context

which has hardly been welcoming to outsiders.88 Literature's participation in history

is vehicular. It is one of the mediums through which pass great informing ideas

85 M. Asaduddin “Fiction as History: Partition Stories” S. Settar and Indira Baptista Gupta

(eds.), Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension, Vol. II, Manohar, New Delhi, 2002, p. 313.

86 Jasbir Jain, Reading Partition/Living Partition, Rawat, Jaipur, 2007, p. 4 87 Harry R. Garvin (ed.), Bucknell Review: Literature and History, Bucknell University

Press, London, 1977, p. 9. 88 John V. Fleming, "Historians and the Evidence of Literature", Journal of

Interdisciplinary History, Vol.4, No.1, 1973, 95.


13

binding one age to another. It is an index of cultural continuity and cultural change-

the reliable repository of received opinion.89 However, the dialectic relationship

between literary narratives and historical reality has been a subject of critical

discourse for centuries. In the traditional scholarship, facts have always been

privileged over fiction, historians stress immutability of facts.90 The historical

students of literature confronted with ‘real’ historians, find themselves in

unenviable position facing the vociferous and numerous band of their colleagues

who insist that the claims of historical analysis in literary study are either downright

fraudulent or substantially irrelevant to the real object of the discipline-not the

ideas, history, context, or relations of literature, but literature itself'.91

Though literature has not been ignored in endeavour to comprehend the past,

the use of proper literary texts by historians is an interesting subject, which still

remains for the most parts unexamined.92 It is seen that historians, who have already

been in touch with the literary studies, have remained unaware of the continuing

controversy in critical theory about the role of historical considerations in literary

analysis. The discussion of problems of interpretation, which are common concern

of all the humanities, has been raised to a level of considerable sophistication.93

Unlike other broad disciplines of academic enquiry, the study of literature,

even within the wide parameters of its present meaning, springs from no clear

traditions in the academies of ancient and medieval worlds. It is a modern creation,

and the product of a rather odd evolution of almost Hegelian purity. Although there

were ambitious attempts at systematic literary study in the eighteenth century, the

real contours of the discipline emerged in the nineteenth century, and in a context

which encouraged schematic, nationalistic and 'scientific designs'. The evolution of

89 Ibid., p. 96. 90 M. Asaduddin, "India's Partition: Literary Narratives and Retrieval of History",

Encounter, Vol.2, No. 1,1999, p. 162. 91 John V. Fleming, “Historians and the Evidence of Literature”, p. 97. 92 Allan H. Pasco, "Literature as Historical Archive", New Literary History, Vol. 35, 2004,

p. 377. 93 John Flenning, “Historians and the Evidence of Literature”, p. 97.


14

literary studies in the universities of the early part of this century was rapid and

dramatic, and the absolute dominance of 'philology' was broken.94 The writing of

history has been a perennial concern of literary studies, yet it is principally in the

past twenty years that thinking of history as a specifically textual concern has

entered the historical consciousness of literary studies. 95

Literature is perhaps a super history with wider and more varied sources than

those used by the historian.96 Works of literature must be approached primarily in

terms of their own inner structure, imagery, metaphor, rhythm, delineation of

character, dynamics of plot and so on.97 One is less likely to distort literature as

evidence if one has lively sense of literature as fact. A work of literature is a

practice and conscious organization of experience, and it must always primarily be

treated as such.98

Literature is a vital record of what people have observed and what they

experienced. The creative writer tries to capture the event through slices and

fragments as an act of remembrance. Instead of trying to draw some generalized

magisterial conclusions from isolated events and imposing some arbitrary pattern on

them, literature records the writer's endeavour to reconstruct reality in slices and

fragments by dramatizing some human situations.99 The historical use of fiction

varies considerably, depending upon the area and period of interest. For instance,

cultural and intellectual historians of modern France and Britain consider a novel as

one of their major sources, while political and economic historians of early modern

Germany rarely consider it at all. Obviously, appropriateness of source determines

94 Ibid., p. 98. 95 Peter Lambert and Philipp Schofield, Making History: An Introduction to the History and

Practices of a Discipline, Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 162, 163. 96 Cushing Strout, "Border Crossing: History, Fiction and Dead Certainties", History and

Theory, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1992, p.161. 97 Diana T. Laurenson and Alan Swingewood, The Sociology of Literature, Gibbon and

Ker, London, 1971, p. 11. 98 Raymond Williams, Reading and Criticism, Frederick Muller Ltd., London, 1962, p. 102. 99 M. Asaddudin, "Literary Narratives and Retrieval of History ", p. 162.


15

these differences, a diversity that makes nearly impossible a study of the use of

prose fiction by all historians.100

The linguistic turn in human sciences has stimulated interest in the role of

texts in various disciplines, and an interest in literary theory as the most obvious

model for the study of such textual phenomena. It is to be believed that there is no

absolute qualitative difference between narrative history and narrative fiction. The

two should be thought of not as qualitatively distinct genres but as opposite ends of

a single continuum or spectrum.101 In spite of internecine strife, literary studies

share a comparative cohesiveness of subject matter which historians might well

envy. The renewal of relationship between history and literature will probably not

emerge from a dialogue between critics and scholars within the discipline of literary

studies nor from a sudden intervention by historians. Rather, it must come from

expanding consciousness of historians alert to the possibilities implicit in the tools

of other disciplines, energetic enough to learn to use them, and tactful enough to use

them well.102

Most people think that the historian has a responsibility to tell the truth about

the past. This is one of the things that distinguishes the writer of history from the

writer of fiction, who is free from this responsibility. As literary genres, history and

fiction are conventionally considered mutually exclusive: history relates events that

really happened in the past, fiction portrays imaginary events, that is, things that

never happened at all. But this distinction has lately been challenged by some

literary theorists and philosophers of history.103 One can see why the distinction

might begin to blur if we look first at works considered fictional. Recently, some

novelists have crossed conventional genres by attributing fictional activities to real

historical characters. But even in quite traditional fiction, the imaginary events of

100 James Smith Allen, "History and the Novel: Mentality in Modern Popular Fiction",

History and Theory, Vol. 22, No. 3, October 1983, p.233. 101 Matt F. Oja, "Fictional History and Historical Fiction", History and Theory, Vol. 27, No.

2, May 1988, p. 112. 102 John V. Fleming, "Historians and the Evidence of Literature", p. 101. 103 David Carr et al (eds.), The Ethics of History, N.W. University Press, Illionois, 2004, p.

247.


16

novels (and plays and films) are often set in real places and against the background

of real historical events. Thus, many works classified as fiction contain elements of

history. This is an uncontroversial observation with which a few, including the

novelists themselves, would disagree.104

The historical insight of literary scholars will undoubtedly continue to

provide a vital impulse to literary studies, but the discipline itself is at once too

diffuse in its interests and too burdened with critical expectations to take up a task,

which it is uncertain, in its own.105 History does not as such differ from fiction,

therefore, insofar as it essentially depends on and develops our skill and subtlety in

following stories. History does, of course, differ from fiction insofar as it is

obligated to rest upon evidence of occurrence in real space and time of what it

describes and insofar as it must grow out of a critical assessment of the received

materials of history, including the analyses and interpretations of other historians.106

The legacy of history is variantly reconstructed in imaginative writing, for

instance, through crystallization of the 'particular' or an expansive probe into the

general or the 'epochal'. In both cases, the artist confronts an unfolding of the

historical process in terms of factual events, myths, icons and norms. In fact, the

'historical' as any other aspect of social reality, does not get documented or factually

reproduced in literature. Creative practice operates through 'selection' in order to be

meaningful.107 The best evidence that there is something amiss in the social context

of literature is the frequency with which the question of relationship of literature

and society is put and discussed. It was Beatrice Webb, investigating nineteenth-

century social history, who remarked that for much of her evidence, and particularly

for evidence about the way in which individuals lived the only documents open to

her were the works of great mid-Victorian novelists. Social historians afterwards

104 Ibid., p. 247. 105 John. V. Fleming, "The Historians and the Evidence of Literature", p. 102. 106 Louis O. Mink, "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension", New Literary

History, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1970, p. 545 107 Asha Kaushik, "Partition of India: Response of Indian Novelist in English". p. 39.


17

have made the same point.108 Literature, all will admit, very frequently provides

social evidence. The historian goes to the literature with his mind largely made up.

But it must be insisted that the evidence which literature may provide - and it is

indeed evidence that is not available elsewhere - is accessible only if the literature is

treated as literature.109 The recent revival of interest in the relationship between the

content of historical writing and literary forms in which it is represented may be

viewed as an attempt to provide a new common ground of history and literature to

replace the old one.110

The distinction between history and fiction is as universally shared an item in

common sense as any distinction in western culture, at least since the rise of popular

literacy. Everyone knows as certainly that two bodies can not occupy the same

space at the same time, that history claims to be a true representation of the past

while fiction does not even when it purports to describe actions and events located

in particular times and places.111 To say that something in a history ‘isn't so’ is to

say that it did not happen or was not that way. This acknowledges what history and

fiction have in common as well as how they differ.112 Fiction rationalizes the

imaginary, short of asserting its superiority over logic. It can turn a historical and

social situation into a myth or on the other hand, take on the iconoclastic role of

demolishing mystery. All the facts of civilization, culture and politics regularly

become material for fiction.113

It is common to distinguish history from literature on grounds that history

deals in the realm of fact while literature moves in the realm of fiction. It is true that

historian may not invent his facts or references while the ‘literary’ writer may and in

108 Raymond Williams, Reading and Criticism, p. 99. 109 Ibid., pp.100, 101. 110 Robert Anchor, "Narrativity and the Transformation of Historical Consciousness", CLIO:

A Journal of Literature and Philosophy of History, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1986, p. 121. 111 Louis O. Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument", Geoffrey Roberts (ed.),

History and Narrative Reader, Routledge, London, 2001, p. 211. 112 Ibid., p. 212. 113 Michel Zeraffa, Fictions: The Novel and Social Reality, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,

1976, p.136.


18

this respect the 'literary' writer has a greater margin of freedom in exploring

relationships. But on the other levels, historians do make use of heuristic fictions

and models to orient their research into facts.114 If handed judiciously and in answer

to appropriate questions, literature can provide a reliable window on the past. Used

carefully and remembering that reality is never pure, simple or linear - literature can

bring a fresh light to our perception of history. One should not expect literature to

be an exact mirror or have a one-to-one relationship with objective reality but the

historian and critic can find it extraordinarily useful. It is a response to reality,

whether by reflection or reaction.115

It is to be realized that life itself is 'inexact' and that one of the most practical

things we can do is to develop an understanding of ourselves and of the limits of our

abilities. Fiction or literature in general also deals with this practical concern but in

its own particular way.116 History and fiction are alike stories or narratives of events

and actions. But for history both the structure of the narrative and its details are

representations of past actuality; and the claim to be true representation is

understood by both writer and reader. For fiction, there is no claim to be a true

representation in any particular respect. Even though much might be true in the

relevant sense, nothing in the fictional narrative marks out the difference between

the true and imaginary; and this is a convention that amounts to a contract to which

writer and reader subscribe.117

Literary and rhetorical theory does not deny the traditional difference

assumed in normal historical practice between history and fiction: rather it

challenges the nature and force of that distinction in theory and in actual practice.118

114 Dominick Lacapra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts", History and

Theory, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1980, p. 270. 115 Allan H. Pasco, "Literature as Historical Archive", New Literary History, Vol. 35, 2004,

p. 374. 116 John Antico and M.H. Hazelrigg, Insight through Fiction: Dealing Effectively with Short

Story, Cummings Publishing Company, Menlo Park, California, 1970, p. 339. 117 Louis O. Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument", p. 212. 118 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story: History as Text and Discourse, Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 66.


19

The notion of literary genre provides a clue, even a framework, for the reader on

how to read and interpret a work.119 It remains for us to consider the relationship of

history and the novel or rather historian and the novelist. If every fact is, to some

extent, a fiction and if the historian must be master of his words as much of his facts

then is there anything left to distinguish him from the novelist.120 Like histories,

most historical novels have until recently tended towards invoking authenticity of

time they describe but both histories and historical novels employ devices of

interpretation to flesh out documentary and arti-factual evidence. Similarly, novels,

like historical novels, may evoke a time’s reality to give context to their imaginary

characters and plots. But even realistic novels, like fantasies create the worlds their

characters inhabit.121 We often treat narrative literature as if it is gossip about non-

existent people, or something the author is trying to tell us directly, in doing so we

go against the specific nature of literature.122 Surely, the difference between the

historian and the novelist is narrower than what we may have been accustomed to

think.123

A history is presented to its readers as a true story as opposed to, say, a novel

because it alludes or refers to, and therefore implies, a world supposedly not of the

author’s imagining but of factual recreation. Historians refer to and try to represent

actual events and persons in the past. They are not allowed to make up persons or

events like novelists, who produce imagined or created worlds or persons and

events.124 But the novelist has produced valuable evidence for the historian. The

novelist frequently furnishes actual historical ‘material’: vivid details about the past,

many of which details are historically verifiable, since the seriousness of the

119 Ibid., p. 67. 120 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past, Transaction Publishers,

New Brunswick, 2005 (First Published 1968), pp. 114, 115. 121 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, p. 67. 122 Jill Didur, Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, Pearson Longman, Delhi,

2006, p. 10. 123 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 115. 124 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, p. 67.


20

novelist’s research of the past is at times comparable to that of the historian.125

Seeking a renegotiation of relationships between texts and other signifying

practices, going so far as to dissolve ‘literature’ into the historical context that

academic literary studies has traditionally held in abeyance, ‘new historicists’ have

clouded the conventional waters of literary studies.126 This new challenge gave

scholars new opportunities to traverse the boundaries separating history,

anthropology, art, politics, literature and economics.127

Both history and fiction impose form on a formless time. History is a

meaning imposed on time by means of language and same definition would suit

fiction perfectly well. The historian through his methodology professes a guarantee

for the reality of his story and the novelist is under the same restraint, minus only

the footnotes.128 Moreover, a novel may be praised because of its stimulation of

reality even as its author makes up conversations, actions, places, characters and

plots.129 The novelist, through his art of selecting, ordering and describing some

details, may draw the historian’s attention to overlooked aspects, problems and

periods.130 The novel gives the historian new freedom, inviting him to go beyond the

document. History, however, remains the raw material for the novelist’s human

condition. Like novelists, historians are constantly faced with behaviour that does

not fit some kind of assumed reality.131 The novelist’s description of certain

contemporary scenes which he himself witnessed is often first rate historical

evidence. Fiction is often an aid to history and the penetrating eye of a genius can

discern much that remains elusive to the patient researches of historians.132

125 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 115. 126 Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, Making History, p. 166. 127 Ibid., p. 166. 128 Robert V. Hine, “When Historians Turn to Fiction”, The History Teacher, Vol. 21, No. 2,

1988, p. 216. 129 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, p. 68. 130 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 115. 131 Robert V. Hine, “When Historians Turn to Fiction”, p. 216. 132 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 115.


21

The imaginative power demanded for a great historian is different from that

demanded for a great poet but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no

sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real

and vivid, presentation of the past can come only from the one whose imaginative

gift is strong.133 Historians from below are, thus, more likely to emphasize social

and cultural rather than political history, drawing on ‘soft’ sources such as literary

texts, autobiographies, myths and visual representations as well as ‘hard’ sources

such as official government documents, state papers and statistical data.134 The

novelist’s description of certain contemporary scenes, as well as description of

certain fictitious characters and events may serve the historian under certain

circumstances – when for example, these are prototypical representatives of certain

contemporary realities. Fictional characters may represent prototypical tendencies

and potentialities that did exist in the past, tendencies about the existence of which

actual historical evidence is available elsewhere. A deliberate exaggeration, a satire

may be a guide to historical understanding and the sensitive historian may include it

in his writing for the sake of illustration.135 Otherwise, historians claim accuracy

with regard to their subjects and fidelity to the past in their texts on the ground that

they do not create persons or actions as existing without some evidence from past

sources, do not allude to acts or events for which they lack documentary

information.136 History conceives all of the past time as a single huge unit, a solid

object, out of which smaller units may be taken. That is pure geometric forms which

permit no speculative extension beyond themselves. The novelist’s and poet’s

conception of past time is, with a few notable exceptions, radically opposed to

stasis. It is more fluid and it rests upon the metaphor of ‘river of time’.137

133 Theodore Roosevelt, “History as Literature”, p. 475. 134 Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity, Routledge, London, 2002, p. 123. 135 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 116, 117. 136 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, p. 68. 137 Fred Chappell, “Six Propositions about Literature and History”, New Literary History,

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1970, p. 516.


22

Unfortunately, social historians have expended more effort extracting and

verifying information from novels than they have spent considering how this should

be done. Compared with quantitative history, the level of theoretical and technical

sophistication in the historian’s use of literature has been remarkably low.138 Unself-

conscious, electic, traditional historians tend to shy away from this kind of

theorizing, thus compounding the numerous problems of using a source as

unreliable as fiction.139 It is a common place of historical theory that all historical

accounts are ‘artistic’ in some way. The artistic component in historical discourse

can be disclosed by an analysis that is specifically rhetorical in nature.140 A

metaphor in novel can be used to explain more than the immediate implications the

author may have had in mind.141 The novelists do not pretend that the worlds they

depict actually existed but historians assert that the world they recreate had

happened in terms of its essential actions, persons and so on. Whereas the novelists

create or construct the worlds their texts depict, historians (in their own opinion)

recreate or reconstruct the worlds of the past in their texts.142 Moreover, literary

history belongs within history; it is not merely its cultural appendix as Trevelyan

put, “like the tail of a cow”. A novel may articulate, generate, reflect, speed up,

slow down currents of opinion, social and cultural tendencies.143 Literary theorists

deny the grossly undifferentiated objectivist realism that historians so often use to

justify their practice for a more ‘realistic’ approach to their texts and

presuppositional frameworks that give histories the normal or conventional forms

they take.144

138 James Smith Allen, “History and the Novel”, p. 235. 139 Ibid., p. 235. 140 Hayden White, “Historicism, History and Figurative Imagination”, History and Theory,

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1965, p. 55. 141 James Smith Allen, “History and the Novel”, p. 237. 142 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, p. 68. 143 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 117. 144 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, p. 68.


23

The difference between histories and novels, is not so much that the former

deal with real things and the latter do not. Novels often refer to real things and

pertain to real life, as we have seen but that history purports to tell only of real

things to refer only to a real, not imaginated world. Although history and fiction

may have different conventions of referring to the worlds they depict, they share

narration and other modes of representation in doing so.145 Thus, the difference

between narrative histories and narrative fiction is not their structures of factuality

as such but their overall interpretive structures and what those lead readers to

presume about the narrated world represented. Historical novels can be meticulous

in depicting the larger context of an era while creating either the chief actors in the

world or giving them undocumented thoughts and actions.146 The functions of

historians and novelists overlap; their dependence is mutual: their approach is much

the same - description, in prose, always the description of some kind of past. In the

broad sense, every novel is a historical novel.147 On the other hand, in creating

historical world, historians make generalizations that go far beyond their

documented evidence, whether they involve the general mental climate said to

prevail, the supposedly typical behaviour of the period, or the inferences drawn

about the lessons of the history portrayed. Historians in narrative histories deploy

the elements of their story just as novelists do. To that extent, history and fiction

share conventions of reference and representation and modes of narrativity and may

be analyzed by the same methods.148 Hence, the argument over the fictiveness of

history must distinguish between factual references as such in histories versus the

fictiveness of the total textual production through its conventions of the

representation.149

Besides fiction itself, the two other key concepts are narrative and

imagination. If we are to evaluate these views about the relationship between history

145 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, pp. 68-69. 146 Ibid., p. 69. 147 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 118. 148 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond Great Story, p. 69. 149 Ibid., p. 68.


24

and fiction, it will be necessary to examine these concepts and their combination.

The connection between what is even loosely meant by ‘history’ and narrative is

accepted as a fact of life even by those who regret it. A ‘narrative’ is an account of

what happened, understood as a sequence of occurrences. Essentially, then a

narrative is structured in terms of ‘this happened, then that happened’ and so on. It

is, in other words, the familiar form any story takes.150 All history presupposes

narrative, the story form providing the historian with an organizing scheme just as

theory provides one for the scientist.151 Narrative is the typical form of discourse

employed by the historian.152

In contemporary historical theory, the topic of narrative has been the subject

of extraordinarily intense debate.153 Within professional historical studies, however,

the narrative has been viewed for the most part neither as a product of a theory nor

as the basis for a method, but rather as a form of discourse which may or may not be

used for the representation of historical events, depending upon whether the primary

aim is to describe a situation, analyze a historical process, or tell a story.154

It has been held that narratives can themselves be explanatory in a special

way; or that narrative is per se a form of explanation, if not indeed self-

explanatory.155 For the narrative historian, the historical method consists in the

investigation of documents in order to determine what is true or most plausible story

that can be told about the events of which they are evidence.156 The technique of

narrative, as it is used by historians, in order to show that it is not merely an

incidental, stylistic feature of the historian’s craft, but is essential to the business of

150 M.C. Lemon, Philosophy of History, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 298. 151 Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965,

p.142. 152 Morton White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge, New York, 1965, p.4. 153 Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”, History

and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1984, p.1. 154 Ibid., p. 2. 155 W.H. Dray, “On the Nature and Role of Narrative in Historiography”, History and

Theory, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1971, p. 153. 156 Hayden White, “ The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”, p. 2.


25

historical explanation.157 The very notion of event is so ambiguous that it makes no

sense at all to speak of an event per se but only of events under description.

Narrativity is a mode of description which transforms events into historical facts by

demonstrating their ability to function as elements of complemented stories.158 The

narrative form of historical accounts is not just a rhetorical device or an arbitrarily

chosen art form that permits the communication of claims about what happened.159

What distinguishes ‘historical’ from ‘fictional’ stories is first and foremost

their contents rather than their form. The content of historical stories is real events,

events that really happened rather than imaginary events, events invented by the

narrator. This implies that the form in which historical events present themselves to

a prospective narrator is found rather than constructed.160 But by common consent, it

is not enough that a historical account deals in real, rather than merely imaginary

events; and it is not enough that the account in its order of discourse represents

events according to chronological sequence in which they originally occurred. The

events must not be only registered within chronological framework but narrated as

well and revealed as preserving a structure, an order of meaning, which they do not

possess as mere sequence.161 Both historians and writers of imaginative fiction know

well the problems of constructing a coherent narrative account, with or without the

constraint of arguing from evidence, but even so they may not recognize the extent

to which narrative as such is not just a technical problem for writers and critics but a

primary and irreducible form of human comprehension, an article in the constitution

of common sense.162

History and fiction are alike stories or narratives of events and actions. But

for history both the structure of the narrative and its details are representations of

157 A. R. Louch, “History as Narrative”, History and Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1969, p. 54 158 Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument”, p.212. (emphasis original). 159 Laurent Stern, “Narrative Versus Description in Historiography”, New Literary History,

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1990, p. 564. 160 Hayden White, “ The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”, p. 2. 161 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1980, p. 9. 162 Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument”, p.212.


26

past actuality; and the claim to be true representation is understood by both writer

and reader. For fiction, there is no claim to be a true representation in any particular

respect. Even though much might be true in the relevant sense, nothing in the

fictional narratives marks out the difference between the true and imaginary; and

this a convention that amounts to a contract to which writer and reader subscribe.163

The historian sees a sequence of events as connected, belonging together, having an

identity, and then constructs the narrative that reveals the course of evolution, of

connectedness, among these events.164 The central concern is not how narrative as

text is constructed, but rather how it operates as an instrument of mind in the

construction of reality.165 To grasp the entity on which historical narration is built is

in itself part of business of historical discovery.166 A chronicle is not a narrative,

even if contains the same set of facts as its informational content. This is because a

narrative discourse performs differently from a chronicle. The point is that

narrativization produces a meaning quite different from that produced by

chronicalization.167 Thus, history without narrative can not be true history but at

best chronicle, a recitation of events in sequential order, but at a low level of

meaning and significance.168 Even though narrative form may be, for most people,

associated with fairy tales, myths and the entertainments of the novel, it remains

true that narrative is primary cognitive instrument. Narrative form as it is exhibited

in both history and fiction is particularly important as a rival to theoretical

explanation or understanding.169 When the reader recognizes the story being told in

an historical narrative as a specific kind of story, for example, as an epic, romance,

tragedy, comedy or farce he can be said to have ‘comprehend’ the meaning

163 Ibid, p. 212. 164 A. R. Louch, “History as Narrative”, History and Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1969, p. 59. 165 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 1,

1991, pp. 5, 6. 166 A. R. Louch, “History as Narrative”, p. 59. 167 Hayden White, “ The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”,p. 19. 168 Robert Anchor, “Narrativity and Transformation of Historical Consciousness”, p. 125. 169 Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument”, p. 213.


27

produced by the discourse. This comprehension is nothing other than the recognition

of the form of the narrative.170 Narrative history borrows from fictional narrative,

the convention by which a story generates its own imaginative space, within which

it neither depends on nor can displace other stories; but it presupposes that past

actuality is a single and determinate realm, a presupposition, once it is made

explicit, is at odds with the incomparability of imaginative stories.171 Narrative

historiography may very well dramatize historical events and historical processes. In

historical narratives, the systems of meaning production peculiar to a culture or

society are tested against the capacity of any set of real events.172 The acceptability

of a narrative obviously cannot depend on its correctly referring to reality, else there

could be no fiction. Realism in fiction must then indeed be a literary convention

rather than a matter of correct reference.173 So narrative form in history, as in

fiction, is an artifice, the product of individual imagination. Yet at the same time, it

is accepted as claiming truth as representing a real ensemble of interrelationships in

past actuality.174 Thus, the narrative theory also establishes the inter-play of history

and fiction. History often clothes itself in the authority of an academic discipline

claiming to tell us the truth about the past, to be not fiction but fact. But as

narrative, it can no longer uphold this claim. History must, at the very least, be

recognized as a mixture of fiction and fact. Indeed, it seems that the whole

distinction between fiction and non-fiction must be questioned.175 The basic insight

of the narrative theory is that all narratives - fiction as well history - manifest a

structural unity and differ only in the various ways in which they conceive and order

the evidence.176

170 Hayden White, “ The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”, p. 20. 171 Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument”, p. 217. 172 Hayden White, “ The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”, p. 21. 173 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, p. 13. 174 Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument”, p. 218. 175 David Carr et al. (eds.), Ethics of History, p. 251. 176 Robert Anchor, “Narrativity and Transformation of Historical Consciousness”, p. 124.


28

Imagination is central to the history-literature debate. The concept of

imagination is pivotal in the construction of both history and literature. This is a fact

that history, literature, science and technology all display the workings of critical

imagination. “Good historical writings, as distinct from chronicling, are certainly

imaginative”.177 The historians who are always against the use of literature as

historical evidence claim that literature or fiction is always full of imagination and

away from reality. But this is not the case, critical imagination is central in the

textual construction of reality in both history and fiction. According to R. G.

Collingwood, “History is the re-enactment of the past in historian’s mind”.178 Thus,

historian employs the tool of imagination. He further says that the historian’s

picture of his subject, whether that subject be a sequence of events or a past state of

things, thus appears as a web of imaginative construction stretched between certain

fixed points. It is, thus, the historian’s picture of the past, the product of his own a

priori imagination.179

The human imagination either in history or fiction is always conditioned by

the social reality and socio-political forces. Imagination is a “transcendental

function of mind by which it gives symbolic expression to the ideal truth which may

be implicit truth of the actual world. Imagination is neither merely fancy nor simple

cognition.”180 To historicist imagination, history is the past, or perhaps the past seen

in and through the present; and the historical task is to attempt a reconstruction of

the past including perhaps the present of the past.181 The resemblance between the

historian and the novelist here reaches its culmination. Each of them makes it his

business to construct a picture, which is partly a narrative of events, partly a

description of situations, exhibition of motives, analysis of characters. Both novel

and history are self-explanatory, self-justifying, the product of an autonomous self-

177 John Passmore, “Narrative and Events”, History and Theory, Vol. 26, No. 4, 1987, p. 69. 178 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p.282. 179 Ibid., pp. 242,245. 180 G. C. Pandey, “The Nature of Imagination in the Context of Aesthetic Creativity and

Social Transformation”, Sudhir Chandra (ed.) Social Transformation and Creative Imagination, Allied Publishers, New Delhi, 1984, p. 6.

181 P. Hamilton, Historicism, Routledge, London, 2007, p. 131.


29

authorizing activity, and in both cases their activity is of imagination.182 Some

literary historiographers have insisted upon the importance of imagination in

breathing life into the facts of history. Fiction, when aspiring to be something higher

than mere romance, does not prevent but elucidates facts. As for other literary

historians, the artist in history should exercise his imagination to flesh in ‘the cold

outlines of the rapid chronicles’.183 After all, it is the imagination as a form giving

power which must give even history’s raw data their intelligible contours, almost as

if in accord with compromise between history and fiction.184 We can not think of

imagination without thinking of an activity of the mind which stands in some

determinate correspondence with reality.185

The historian’s picture of the past is thus in every detail an imaginary

picture, and its necessity is at every point the necessity of imagination.186 Thus, the

imagination collapses history into the categories of human form: in effect, it turns

history itself into a fiction.187 The historian has to exercise the belief that

imagination does nothing to destroy the distinction between history and fiction if

they are also called upon to exercise forms of criticism to which the writer of fiction

is not subject and has objectives which the writer of historical fiction only partially

shares.188 As works of imagination, the historian’s work and novelist’s do not differ.

Where they do differ is that the historian’s picture is meant to be true. The novelist

has a single task only to construct a coherent picture that makes some sense. The

historian has a double task to do; to construct a picture of things as they really were

and of events as they really happened.189 A novelist is an imaginative historian who

182 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 246. 183 James C. Simmons, The Novelist as Historian: Essays on Victorian Historical Novel,

Mouton, Paris, 1973, p. 45. 184 Murray Krieger, “Fiction, History and Empirical Reality”, Critical Inquiry, Vol.1, No. 2,

p. 345. 185 G. C. Pandey, “Social Transformation and Creative Imagination”, p. 2. 186 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 245. 187 Murray Krieger, “Fiction, History and Empirical Reality”, p. 345. 188 John Passmore, “Narrative and Events”, pp. 69, 70. 189 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 246.


30

is able to get closure to contemporary facts than a social scientist possibly can.190

The purely imaginary characters, when they are introduced, are always a few in

number and so ordered as not to interfere with actual historical events and

motivations.191 The presentation of any historiographical discourse in narrative form

represents an introduction of some degree of fictional quality. This is so because no

actual set of past events has an intrinsic plot, and so in fitting any chronology into a

chosen emplotment the historian is necessarily adding a certain amount of produced

meaning.192 It could be said that all history, of the moment and of the past, is part of

a rhetoric close to that of fiction. Certainly, the ‘revisionist’ historians have exposed

the imaginative limitations and assumptions of many earlier historians; and they

make no great effort to disguise their own.193 If certain statistics are historical

documents, so are certain characters composed by the novelist out of imagination as

well as of reality of historical imagination and historical reality.194 Thus, it can be

said that anything that is the object of imagination must be imaginary in the sense of

non-existent. But this is only part of what we mean by imagination. In the broadest

sense, imagination is best described as the capacity to envision what is not directly

present to the senses. Fiction is surely the product of imagination but so is

history.195 It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagination tends to inaccuracy.

Vast and fundamental truths can be discerned and interpreted only by one whose

imagination is lofty. When we say that a great historian must be a man of

imagination, we use the word as we use it when we say that a great statesman must

be a man of imagination.196 If the historian draws on imagination, it is in order to

speak about how things were, not to conjure up something imaginary. The

190 Sudhir Chandra (ed.), Social Transformation and Creative Imagination, p.xvii. 191 James C. Simmons, The Novelist as Historian, p. 46. 192 Matt F. Oja, “Fictional History and Historical Fiction”, p. 112. 193 George Garlett, “Dreaming with Adam: Notes on Imaginary History”, New Literary

History, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1970, p. 411. 194 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 117. 195 David Carr et al (eds.), Ethics of History, pp. 254, 255 196 Theodore Roosevelt, “History as Literature”, p. 476.


31

difference between history and fiction is not that in one case imagination in

combination with other capacities is marshelled in the service of producing

assertions, theories and narratives about how the world was and in the other case it

is used to produce stories about characters, events, actions and even worlds that

never were.197 Thus, while speaking about the role of imagination it can not be

claimed that every use of imagination is legitimate but at the same time it is to be

said that everything produced by imagination need not be merely imaginary. History

being a literary genre, shares many features with fiction, notably the narrative form

and the use of imagination.

The role of interpretation and the rise of hermeneutic theory has also given

more and more importance to literature in the historical studies. Historian’s task is

just not to produce or document the facts but also to give a rational interpretation to

the facts. “Facts are not more important than are words; indeed they are inseparable

from words, because we speak and think in words. History is thought, spoken and

written with words and the historian must be master of his words as much as of his

facts”.198 Generally, historians believe that all historical narratives contain an

irreducible and inexpungeable element of interpretation. The historian has to

interpret his materials in order to construct the moving pattern of images in which

the form of historical process is to be mirrored.199 Contemporary theorists have

insisted that historians explain the events that make up their narratives by

specifically narrative means of encodation, that is to say, by finding the story which

lies buried within or behind the events and telling it in a way that an ordinarily

educated man would understand. Such an explanation though literary in form, is not

to be considered as non-scientific or anti – scientific.200 The historian’s relative

choice, with respect to each domain of history he gives up, is always confined to the

choice between history which teaches us more and explains less, and history which

197 Ibid., p. 255. 198 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, p. 114. 199 Hayden White, “Interpretation in History”, New Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1973, p.

281. 200 Ibid., p. 286.


32

explains more and teaches less.201 Interpretation may enter into historian’s account

of the past at some point in the construction of his narrative and historian tries to

distinguish between those aspects of his accounts that are empirically founded and

those based on interpretative strategies.202 But the difference between a historical

and a fictional account of the world is formal not substantive; it resides in the

relative weights given to the constructive elements in them: the informing pattern of

historian’s book, which is his myth or plot, is secondary, just as detail to a poet is

secondary.203 A historical interpretation, like a poetic fiction, can be said to appeal

to its readers as a plausible representation of the world by virtue of its implicit

appeal to the archetypal story-forms that define the modalities of a given culture’s

literary endowment.204 Historians no less than poets, can be said to gain an

‘explanatory affect’ over and above whatever formal explanations they may offer of

specific historical events by building into their narratives patterns of meaning

similar to those more explicitly provided by literary art of cultures to which they

belong.205

The role of interpretation makes a distinction between ‘mere chronicle’ and

‘smooth narrative’ constructed by the historian from the events contained in the

chronicle. In the smooth narrative, every event falls as it were into its natural place

and belongs to an intelligible whole. In this respect, the ideal of the historian is in

principle identical with that of the novelist or dramatist.206 In history as in fiction,

while we read, we are aware of a sequence of metaphorical identifications; when we

have finished, we are aware of an organizing structural pattern or conceptualized

myth.207 Then it is to be believed that there are at least two levels of interpretation in

every historical work: one in which the historian constitutes a story out of the

201 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, 1966, p. 258. 202 Hayden White, “Interpretation in History”, p. 291. 203 Northrop Frye, “New Directions from Old”, pp. 54, 55. 204 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, 1957, p. 162. 205 Hayden White, “Interpretation in History”, p. 291. 206 W.H Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 33. 207 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 352, 53.


33

chronicle of events and another in which, by a more fundamental narrative

technique, he progressively identifies the kind of story he is telling; comedy,

tragedy, romance, epic, or satire as the case might be.208 Like the realistic novel, a

history is on one level an allegory and the differences between history and a

fictional account of the reality are matters of degree rather than of kind. We can

distinguish between two kinds of meaning provided by historical narrative; history

contains both ‘hypothetical’ and ‘assertive’ elements in the same way that realistic

novels do.209 Through the sense of intentionality or referentiality, the language of

history is assimilated to the language of fiction, and is differentiated only by certain

features like the claim it makes to factuality – a claim that is sometimes made in

historical novels as well.210 Thus, the role to be played by the element of

interpretation also establishes a close proximity between history and literature.

The theory of postmodernism also advocates the use of literature in history.

As per postmodern insights, the reality in its totality is unknowable because it is not

seamless, but fractured, and is to be grasped only in fragments. These fragments,

then, can be integrated to build a comprehensive picture of the event under the

study.211 Instead of trying to draw generalized, magisterial conclusions from isolated

events and imposing some arbitrary pattern on them, literature records the writer’s

endeavour to reconstruct reality in slices and fragments.212 The literature goes onto

tap the unconscious and the irrational as it catches fragmentary realities. It brings

into focus the human agency and dialogues with the notions of guilt and remorse.213

The very separation of both history and literature is being challenged in postmodern

theory: recent critical readings of both history and fiction have focused more on

what the two modes of writing share than on how they differ. The both are identified

208 Hayden White, “Interpretation in History”, p. 292. 209 Northrop Frye, “ New Directions from Old”, p. 80. 210 Fredrick A. Olafson, “Hermeneutics: Analytical and Dialectical”, History and Theory,

Vol. 25, No. 4, 1986, p. 39. 211 M. Asaduddin, India’s Partition: Literary Narratives and Retrieval of History, p. 163. 212 Ibid., p. 162. 213 Jasbir Jain, Reading Partition/Living Partition, p. 4.


34

as linguistics constructs highly conventionalized in their narrative forms.214 In the

context of historiography, postmodernism implies especially a challenge to those

conventional certainties, such as facts, objectivity and truth in terms of which much

history has in the past been written (and read). The skeptical approach of

postmodernist theorists questions the absolute validity of such concepts.215 The

postmodern theory obliterates the secure linear relation between past and present

upon which conventional historical interpretation depends.216 The emphasis now is

less on history as a process of objective discovery and report but, rather, accepts its

fictive nature, that is, its literary constructedness.217 Thus, there can never be one

single privileged position from which the story of the past can finally be told; it

implies an inescapable and inevitable relativism in our own positions in relation to

that past; so it requires that we see any version of history as nothing more than a

tentative hypothesis underpinned by a possibly unstated, but nonetheless specific

purpose, which is mostly presented in linguistic form.218 Imaginative reconstruction

or intellectual systemization is the focus of postmodern rethinking of problems of

how we can and do come to have knowledge of the past.219

The reworking of history can be seen in the work of wide range of

contemporary writers, each of whom draws from a different community and uses a

different set of literary devices to question the traditional methods of historical

representation for a different set of ends. The postmodern fiction sets out to

challenge traditional ideas of narrative construction, verisimilitude and historical

truth.220 History and fiction have always been notoriously porous genres, of course.

At various times both have included in their elastic boundaries such forms as travel

214 Jaspal Kaur Dhanju, History and Postmodernism, Unistar, Chandigarh, 2006, p. 28. 215 Beverley Southgate, History: What and Why, Routledge, London, 2008, (First Published

1996), p.8. 216 Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield (ed.), Making History, p.233. 217 Jaspal Kaur Dhanju, History and Postmodernism, p. 5, 6. 218 Beverley Southgate, History: What and Why, p. 8. 219 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New

York, 2003 (First Published 1988), p.92. 220 Simon Malpas, The Post Modern, Routledge, London, 2007, p.101.


35

tale and various versions of what we call now sociology. It is not surprising that

there would be overlapping of concern and even mutual influences between two

genres.221 According to postmodernists, facts are not discovered, they are actually

sources interpreted according as much to literary as any other criteria.

Consequently, if we approach history as literature we may even write better history,

as we deploy an additional range of critical apparatuses to established rules of

contextualised evidence. By recognizing its literary form, we are not constrained to

present it, as mainstream history would have it done.222 The postmodern theorists

stress the textuality of history and if there is nothing outside the text then history

collapses into fiction, and fact and fiction become indistinguishable from one

another.223 Postmodern writings assert that there are only truths in plural and never

one truth and there is rarely falseness, just others’ truths. Fiction and history are

narratives distinguished by their frames.224 Postmodern fiction suggests that to re-

write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is in both cases, to open it up

to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological.225 History is a

kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of

speculative history …….. by which available data for the composition is seen to be

greater and more various in its sources than the historian supposes.226 Moreover, if

we bear the attack that texts, documents, literary works, whatever do not

transparently reflect reality, but only other texts, then historical study can scarcely

be distinguished from literary study and the past dissolves into literature.227 If there

is no reality out there which is anything but a subjective creation of the historian; in

221 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 92. 222 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 75. 223 Keith Jenkins, On What is History?: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White,

Routledge, London, 2005 (First Published 1995), p. 26. 224 B. H. Smith, On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language,

University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, p. 13. 225 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 110. 226 Richard Trenner (ed.), E. L. Doctrow: Essays and Conversations, Ontario Review Press,

Princeton, 1983, p. 25. 227 Lawrence Stone and G. M. Spiegel, “History and Postmodernism”, Past and Present,

Vol. 135, 1991, p. 192.


36

other words, it is language that creates meaning which in turn creates one image of

the real. This destroys the difference between fact and fiction, and makes entirely

nugatory the dirty and tedious archival work of the historian to dig facts out of the

texts.228

Postmodern fiction reveals the past as always ideological and discursively

constructed. It is a fiction which is concerned both with its status as fiction,

narrative or language and also grounded in some verifiable historical reality. It is

intricately tied to representations of history.229 The postmodern fiction asks how a

world can be interpreted or changed, and is interested in questions of truth and

knowledge. On the other hand, it raises questions about reality and world.230 “Past

events can be altered. History gets rewritten. This applies to the real world too……..

May be the real history of the world is changing constantly. Why? Because history

is a fiction. It is a dream in the mind of humanity, forever striving towards

perfect”.231

Novels incorporate social and political history, though the extent will vary.

“History is true novel which signals that both the genres share the conventions:

selection, organization, diegesis, anecdote, temporal pacing and emplotment”.232

The literature manifestly adds to historical knowledge and directs attention to other

cognate literary texts whose situation in history may have been less accessible.233

The ‘old model’ history essentially presupposes the existence of an ‘objective’

historical truth that can, at least in principle, be finally uncovered to reveal the past

‘as it was’. That truth in its entirety may not have revealed but each piece of

individual research can make some contribution to the final edifice, and each will be

228 Ibid., p. 193. 229 Tim Woods, Beginning Post Modernism, Manchester University Press, Manchester,

2007, p. 56. 230 Simon Malpas, The Postmodern, p. 24. 231 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 111. 232 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 111. 233 Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, Making History, p. 168.


37

recognized and valued accordingly.234 History is as structured, coherent and

teleological as any narrative fiction. It is not only the fiction but history too that is

‘probably betwixt and between’. 235 History and literature have no existence in and

of themselves. It is we who constitute them as the object of our understanding.236

Postmodernism in its more constructive mode has encouraged historians to

look more closely at documents and to think about texts and narratives in new ways.

It has forced historians to interrogate their own methods and procedures as never

before.237 The postmodern challenge forces the historian to ask complex questions

as to how they know things about the past and the conditions under which historical

knowledge is created. The linguistic turn in history has confronted the historical

discipline’s empirical analytical foundations. Accepting history as an essentially

literary activity, it extends epistemology to include its narrative-linguistic

representation.238 The discursive criterion that distinguishes narrative history from

historical fiction is that history evokes testing behaviour in reception; historical

discipline requires an author-reader contract that stipulates investigative equity.239

In the postmodern world, both history and fiction are cultural sign systems,

ideological constructions whose ideology includes their appearance of being

autonomous and self-contained.240 The binary opposition between fiction and fact is

no longer relevant; in any differential system, it is the assertion of space between

the entities that matters.241 For postmodernists, history is not the transparent record

of any sure truth and the fiction corroborates views of historians. For them past

arrives in the form of texts and textualized remainders - memories, reports,

234 Beverley Southgate, History: What and Why, p. 9. 235 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, OUP, London, 1966, p. 235. 236 Jacques Ehrmann, “The Death of Literature”, p. 253. 237 Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, Granta Books, London, 2000, p.248. 238 Jaspal Kaur Dhanju, History and PostModernism, p. 66. 239 Nancy Streuver, “Historical Discourse”, Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 1,

Academic Press, London, 1985, p. 264. 240 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 112. 241 Ibid., p. 113.


38

published writings, archives, monuments and so forth. These texts interact with each

other in complex ways. This does not in any way deny the value of history writing;

it merely redefines the conditions of value.242

Some of the most original investigations of historicity are taking place in

literary practices that are especially aware of changing conditions of life in space

and time. The new historical literature of recent decades is part of the historical turn

in literary studies. Historical literature articulates several issues which can

contribute to current debate about the links between history and literature.243 In

postmodern theory, history becomes a text, a discursive construct upon which

fiction draws as easily as it does upon other texts of literature. History as narrative

account, then, is unavoidably figurative, allegorical, fictive; it is always already

textualized, always interpreted.244 Thus, the postmodern writers indeed often claim

that in history the historically validated facts are redeployed fictionally and

potentially fictional character of history is exported and they try to establish a link

between history and literature.245 In history and literature debate, the postmodernists

give new insights into complexities of narrative discourse and highlight the role of

language in reconstructing the human past.

Michael Foucault246 one of the strong protagonists of postmodernism says

that our only door to experience (past, present or future) is through the primary

medium of language as a signifying process normally constituted within a

framework for the exercise of power, legitimacy and illegitimacy. Derived from

Nietzsche, this is a fundamental shift from empiricism, because it entertains the

242 Dominick Lacapra, History and Criticism, University Press, New York, 1985, p. 128. 243 Peter Lambert and Phillip Schofield (ed.), Making History, p. 169. 244 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, pp. 142, 143. 245 Peter Lambert and Phillip Schofield (ed.), Making History, p. 233. 246 He is regarded by majority of conservative as well as mainstream historians as anti-

historical because of his denial of linear historical causality between events and epochs, favouring instead a history based upon discontinuities between dominant figurative structures operating in human consciousness: Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 129. His writings includes, Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975) and History of Sexuality (1976). He is a multi-faceted intellectual with a pronounced taste for bizarre.


39

impossibility of knowing anything objectively given that objectively itself is a

historical and cultural construct.247 Building on Nietzsche’s criticism of traditional

historiography, he states that past in its pure form does not exist at all and much of

history is forgotten or lost. Therefore, it is only in the perspective of the present that

the past can be explained and thus past’s position of hegemony over the present is

dethroned as was contended by orthodox historians.248 New Historicism, which

developed in the 1980’s, was influenced directly by, among others, Foucault’s

thought and can be seen as an attempt to put Foucault’s ideas to work on literature.

His integration of historical method and analysis into philosophical work was

important in enabling literary scholars to attempt such historical work in their own

field.249 Foucault suggests history is fiction written within the parameters of truth,

except that the former is based on what had happened and existed while the latter’s

basis of construct is imagination.250 According to Foucault, the relationship between

the word and the world is not direct but mediated. Given the new role of language,

the concept of discourse has come to play a significant role in the making of the

meaning of a text. A text of history, in this sense, loses its earlier scientific

moorings and becomes a text open to various interpretations.251 Furthermore,

Foucault argues that because evidence is always presented to us as the product of

pre - packaged figurative codes, its character is dependent on how people in the past

and historians now choose to interpret an event as either in conformity or conflict

with accepted notions of human nature and for cultured practice.252

Roland Barthes evokes a conventional contrast between fictional and

historical narrative and asks: “Is there, in fact, any specific difference between

factual and imaginary narrative, any linguistic feature by which we may distinguish

247 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 129. 248 Jaspal Kaur Dhanju, History and PostModernism, p. 19. 249 Sara Mills, Michael Foucault, Routledge, London, 2007, pp. 120, 121. 250 Jaspal Kaur Dhanju, History and PostModernism, p. 19. 251 C. R. Das, “History and Post Modernism”, Kirit K. Shah and Meherjyoti Sangle (eds.),

Historiography: Past and Present, Rawat, Jaipur, 2005, pp. 155, 156. 252 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 137.


40

on the one hand the mode appropriate to the relations of historical events…….. and

on the other hand, the mode appropriate to the epic, novel and drama.253 He

expresses his negative conclusion when he says that “by its structure alone, without

recourse to its content, historical discourse is essentially a product of ideology, or

rather of imagination”.254 He says that facts about ‘real’ past would be found in

chronicles for instance but historians do not simply represent the facts as they found

them. They worked them into narratives that had meaning and meanings can only be

constituted, not found, thus, by producing narratives of the past the historians were

participating in an imaginary elaboration.255 Roland Barthes made a formal analysis

of historical writings and rejected the root and branch of historical realism.256

Louis O. Mink, an American theorist of whose work has influenced both Paul

Ricour and Hayden White, is considered to be pivotal figure in developing

philosophical discussion on history and narrative. He states that narrative form in

history, as in fiction is an artifice, the product of individual imagination.257 For him,

historian finds the story already hidden in what his data are evidence for; historian

is creative in the invention research techniques to expose it, not in the art of

narrative construction. Thus, properly understood, the story of the past needs only to

be communicated, not constructed.258 He states that the significant conclusions of

historical arguments are embedded or incorporated in the narrative structure of

historical writing itself; they are not propositions for which history provides an

array of evidence, but the specific way in which the evidence is discursively

ordered.259 He says that history tells stories which equate history with literature.260

These authors advocate the use of literature drawing heavily on linguistic theory,

253 Roland Barthes, “Historical Discourse”, Michael Lane (ed.), Introduction to

Structuralism, Basic Books, New York, 1970, p. 145. 254 Ibid, p.153. 255 Jaspal Kaur Dhanju, History and PostModernism, pp. 29, 30. 256 C. R. Das, “History and Post Modernism”, p. 157. 257 Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument”, p. 218. 258 Ibid., p. 215. 259 Louis. O. Mink, Historical Understanding, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1987, p. 130. 260 Louis O. Mink, “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension”, p. 544.


41

view narrative as the essential but largely misunderstood feature of historical

explanation - a misunderstanding that permits history a claim to a spurious

epistemological legitimacy through its favourite metaphor of objectivity.261

The most relevant claims about history and fiction are in fact most fully

expressed in recent works of Paul Ricour and Hayden White. Hayden White is

considered to be high priest of linguistic theory in historical studies. Paul Ricour,

the great French theorist, drawing on the ideas of Kant, Fichte stated that because in

a certain significant way humanity is language, in laying out principles of linguistic

meaning we learn something about ourselves. Thus, through interpretation, we can

learn about what we are and how we know about our world.262 Paul Ricour in Time

and Narrative, though does not try to break down distinction between history and

fiction, speaks of their intersection in the sense that each avails itself of the other.263

Narratives are especially promising because they reveal the temporal nature of

human life. Historical narratives can help us become aware of our responsibilities,

Ricour claims, because they show us other worlds and are always provisional.264 He

argues that history draws on fiction to refigure or restructure time by introducing

narrative contours into the non-narrative time of nature. It is the act of imagining

which effects the reinscription of lived time.265 Paul Ricour steers away from the

view of history as representing the ‘past just as it happened’. History, is rather, a

narrative or icon that selectively represents the past and which puts conflicting

witness testimonies into dialogue.266 According to him, not only the history, but all

texts whether they be works of literature, dancer, plays, can show us the actual

world.267 For him narrative open us to the “realm of the as if” through the mediating

261 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 72. 262 Paul Ricour, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 351 quoted in Marnie Hughes Warrington, Fifty

Key Thinkers on History, Routledge, London, 2008, p. 302. 263 David Carr et al(eds.), The Ethics of History, p. 248. 264 Marnie Hughes Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History, p. 305. 265 Paul Ricour, Time and Narrative, (english translation )Vol. III, The Chicago University

Press, London, 1984, p. 265. 266 Marnie Hughes Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History, p. 305. 267 Ibid., p. 306.


42

role of the imaginary. This is the fictional element in history.268 Fiction borrows as

much from history as much history borrows from fiction.269

Hayden White, the most strongest protagonist of postmodernism, states that

“all history contains a deep verbal structure; this structure or metahistorical element

shapes histories. All history is, therefore, poetic and linguistic and interprets and

moulds facts than discovering or finding them. For this reason, history can be

approached as literature and analysed using tropics of poetic language.270 For him

history writing involves selecting evidence and filling in gaps. But more

importantly, histories are not only about events but also about the possible sets of

relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure.271 Harping on the

‘linguistic turn’ he further says that the older distinction between fiction and

history, in which fiction is concerned as the representation of imaginable and

history as the representation of the actual, must give place to recognition that we

can know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable.272

Hayden White refutes the notion that the aim of historian is to explain the past by

finding, identifying or uncovering the stories that lie buried in chronicles; and that

the difference between history and fiction resides in the fact that the historian finds

his stories whereas the fiction writer invents his.273 Unlike literary fictions, such as

the novel, historical works are made up of events that exist outside the

consciousness of the writer. The events reported in the novel can be invented in a

way that they cannot be in a history. This makes it difficult to distinguish between

the chronicle of events and the story being told in the fiction. In a sense, the story

being told in the novel is indistinguishable from the chronicle of events reported in 268 David Carr et al (ed.), The Ethics of History, p. 249. 269 Paul Ricour, Time and Narrative, (english translation ) Vol. I, The Chicago University

Press, London, 1984, p. 46. 270 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe,

John Hopkins University Press, Baltmore, 1973, p .xii. 271 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse:Essays in Cultural Criticism, John Hopkins

University Press, Baltimore, 1978, p. 94. 272 Ibid., p. 6 273 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe

p.31.


43

the work.274 According to Hayden White, history is arguably a verbal artifact, a

narrative prose discourse of which the content is much invented as found, and which

is constructed by present - minded, ideologically positioned workers (historians and

those acting as if they were historians). The past appropriated by historians, is never

the past itself, but a past evidenced by its remaining and accessible traces.275 In

Mehahistory, he argued that all history writing is basically a linguistic and poetic

act. Facts are not discovered, they are actually sources interpreted according as

much to literary as any other criteria. Consequently, if we approach history as

literature we may even write better history, as we deploy an additional range of

critical apparatus to the established rules of contextualised evidence.276 Hayden

White argues that history also involves the process of imagination because any

context which is to be constructed to contextualise the facts, has to be ultimately

imagined or invented; unlike facts the contexts can never be definitely found.277

Asserting the value of narrativity (which is common in history and fiction) Hayden

White argues that its value is attached to the representation of real events and it

arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness,

and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary.278 His emphasis on

history as a form of literature defines it as a kind of constructionism. He insists that

past like history is not the story, it is the fictional invention of historians as we try

to recount what the past was about.279 Hayden White states that history as a

discipline is in a bad shape today because it has lost sight of its origins in the

literary imagination. In the interest of appearing scientific and objective, it has

repressed and denied to itself its own greatest source of strength and renewal.280

274 Ibid., p. 6. 275 Keith Jenkins, On What is History?, p. 181. 276 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 75. 277 Keith Jenkins, On What is History?, p. 91. 278 Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical

Representation, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1987, p.24. 279 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, pp. 153, 161. 280 Hayden White quoted in Jaspal Kaur Dhanju, History and PostModernism,p.37.


44

Thus, by recognising its literary form it is not to be constrained history to present as

mainstream history would have it done.

The whole foregoing argument establishes a close relationship and interplay

of history and literature. Thus, literature portrays social reality and change and

provides a good deal of evidence. It is valuable primarily as a record of detailed

individual experience which has been coherently stated. Moreover, history is also a

literary genre and it shares many features with the literature particularly the

narrative form and the historian also rests on some degree of imagination for the

reconstruction of the past as ‘history is the re-enactment of the past into historian’s

mind.’ Hence, historian should explore the unexplored evidence into the form of

literature making history more meaningful and nuanced study. Every scrupulous

scholar in history recognizes that no single piece of evidence can stand alone.

Contradictions both within literature and with the results of its use are inevitable

and call out for resolution by additional research in other resources. So, the

historical findings derived from fiction need corroboration from other sources but to

ignore the unique and valuable evidence (in the form of literature) in a stampede for

apt illustration is to show most unhealthy disregard for facts. Moreover, the attempt

is not to privilege fiction over fact rather to integrate the both. Thus, it can be

concluded that for better understanding of certain historical developments, it would

be undoubtedly rewarding to scan the rich repository of diverse experiences

recorded sensitively by a creative writer.

history and literature : theoretical...

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