What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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neilgodfrey
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Bernard Muller wrote: In my experience, it is not often applied, more so among conservative & mythicist scholars/authors, and any ones who are pushing their own agenda.
Doherty's works, and Carrier's, too, I think, are mostly taken up with addressing contrary evidence and scholarship.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Neil
True, but we are talking about removing it from the context of being relayed between parties as understood to be the report of a real experience.
Well, we've done several deliberately artificial things with context in order to explore different related problems. Presumably there would come a time when we'd look at the matter in the full light of everything we know about the stories, to render some finding about them.
This returns us to plausibility. Whether X happened "in history" is a question of evidence, not whether one thinks the story is merely plausible.
Whether X happened is typically uncertain and undecidable, but how plausible it now is that X happened may be worthwhile (and for some things may be "just as good" as certain and decided, but not for all things).

The plausibility of any uncertain proposition, historical or otherwise, ought to reflect both the evidence and the background knowledge which is available to the estimator, according to typical domain-independent normative accounts of uncertain reasoning.

Personally, I wouldn't accept an inference problem where I had no no background knowledge. In problems which I have accepted, I can't recall ever having encountered a real-life case where there wasn't some evidence somewhere, at least in prospect.

On the other hand, I've seen plenty of cases where the evidence is sparse, equivocal, dependent... which has the effect of making background knowledge loom large in the estimate. In cases where the evidence is voluminous, independent and unequivocal (the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor), the background information hardly matters.

I don't know what "merely plausible" means. It is tautological that, regardless of modifier, "it is plausible that X" doesn't imply "X happened." "Merely plausible" at least suggests "implausible," which isn't a synonym for having no plausibility at all, but also isn't easily confused with a categorical assertion that X happened.

So, I'm unsure what point is being made here.
The question we are asking, I suppose, is what makes a plausible writing "fiction" versus "history"?
It is a relevant consideration, no more and no less.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Last edited by neilgodfrey on Fri Jun 30, 2017 3:26 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Hayden White: A Reply

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DCHindley wrote: Mon Apr 24, 2017 8:37 am To illustrate the complexity of a historical narrative, here is a summary of Hayden V. White's elements of historical representation, as found in the 40 page introduction of his 1974 book Metahistory, which technically deals with narratives since the Enlightenment b ut can be used in the ancient period with some adjustments: . . . .
And one reply to Hayden White, this one by Richard J. Evans, in In Defence of History (the bolding is my own, of course):
Is it the case, as Hayden White has maintained, that most professional historians believe that they are constructing their narratives as simulacra of the structures and processes of real events in the past, not as the product of their own aesthetic sensibilities and purposes? It seems unlikely. Every historian is aware of the complexity of the facts, their irreducibility to a single linear narrative; and everyone writing a work of history, or, come to that, a doctoral thesis, is confronted by the problem of how to separate out the still inchoate material collected — or to be collected — during research into a series of more or less coherent narrative and structural strands, and then of how to weave these strands together into a more or less coherent whole. Often the decisions taken have a material effect on the interpretation itself. What might appear to be a conventional historical narrative is often nothing of the kind, but the outcome of a series of aesthetic and interpretative choices. For example, LaCapra has described The Defeat of the Spanish Armada by Garrett Mattingly rather patronizingly as 'a lovely old-style tale', and Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou as a 'highly conventional narrative' presenting a 'traditional story'. But in both cases he misses the point. First, as we have seen, a conventional narrative account of the inquisition register on which Le Roy Ladurie based his book would use it to describe the inquisitorial process in Montaillou. The whole point about Ladurie's book is that it reads it against the grain, for a structural analysis of everyday life and relationships in the village, in which a whole battery of modem anthropological theories is brought to bear on everyday life. Similarly, Mattingly book is a highly complex and sophisticated narrative, moving from one geographical centre to the next (London, Madrid, Antwerp and so on) in a rather Cubist fashion, trying to give us a multiplicity of viewpoints and interweave a number of different narratives. It seems to me to be very much aware of modem novelistic techniques, despite LaCapra's dismissal of it for belonging to a genre of traditional narrative' unaffected by the modem novel. Mattingly shaped his classic book in this multi-stranded narrative form bemuse, as an American, he wanted to get away from British historians' common habit of narrating the whole thing from the British point of view. Historical narrative, then, seldom simply consists of a single linear temporal strand.

Perhaps I may illustrate some of the difficulty of interweaving narrative and causal argument by referring to my own work. . . . .

. . . . My reason for devising twelve parallel causal narratives was mainly aesthetic: it simply seemed the neatest, most economical and above all the most exciting and most interesting way of organizing and presenting the processes going on at the same time. Arranging it all purely in terms of chronology would have delivered a chronicle with no explanatory power whatsoever. The book's structure seemed to me the most effective way of putting across a mass of empirical evidence to support a series of causal arguments and hypotheses.

Most historical narratives consist of a mixture of revealed, reworked, constructed and deconstructed narratives from the historical past and from the historian's own mind. We start with a rough-hewn block of stone, and chisel away at it until we have a statue. The statue was not waiting there to be discovered, we made it ourselves, and it would have been perfectly possible for us to have made a different statue from the one we finally created. On the other hand, we are constrained not only by the size and shape of the original stone, but also by the kind of stone it is; an incompetent sculptor not only runs the risk of producing an unconvincing statue that does not much resemble anything, but also of hammering or chiselling too hard, or the wrong way, and shattering the stone altogether.

We have to work with the limitations of the material. And these limitations are strict and severe. In some cases, the narrative is there in the sources, lived and thought by the people we are writing about: German or Italian unification in the nineteenth century, for example, or the making of the USA in the eighteenth. In other cases it is not. Yet even where historians are aware of the fact that people in the past were consciously living a story they believed in and sought to shape, they can never rest content with simply reproducing it; it must be juxtaposed with others, hidden meanings must be discovered, flaws and contradictions in the story must be exposed. Historians not only deconstruct the narratives of other historians, they also deconstruct the narratives of the past as well.

Hayden White has suggested somewhat condescendingly that history has become 'a refuge' for people who want to find the simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange'. If this ever applied to historians in the past, it certainly does not apply today. It may be part of the postmodern turn in historical studies that so much work is now being done on the irrational, the bizarre and the exceptional in the past. But in truth, ever since the early nineteenth century, one of the main purposes of historians has been to find the strange in the familiar, to increase the distance between ourselves and the past. Empirical historians are constantly telling us that the past is far more complex than the great, supra-historical metanarratives would seem to allow. Back in the 1950s, the liberal American historian Richard Hofstadter was even worried that historians’ commitment to the ‘rediscovery of the complexity of social interests may give us not only a keener sense of the structural complexity of our society in the past, but also a sense of the moral complexity of social action that will lead to political immobility. It was precisely this kind of political consequence that conservatives like Sir Geoffrey Elton most welcomed. Professional historians have more often than not been hostile to ‘oversimplification’ rather than indulging in it.

The postmodernist critic Sande Cohen has gone further than Hofstadter and argued that historical narrative in itself is inherently anti-intellectual. Historians, he says, ‘use narration in order to deflect thinking,’ and he condemns their ‘outrageous recreation of tutelary narration’ where ‘the reader is not even allowed to think’. Thus history, he thinks, is part of ‘the discourse of bourgeois society’. By focusing attention on the past, historians are engaging in ‘aggression against the present’, which is part of ‘capitalism’s promotion of thought forms that make the present as something that matters all but inaccessible’. Building on these arguments, Cohen then goes on to condemn the Marxist historian Edward Thompson’s polemic against French structuralist Marxism as ‘an aggressive rejection of the nonnarrated’, demonstrating a ‘sad’ conformity to ‘bourgeois historiography’ and a most un-Marxist rejection of ‘critical thinking’, while even Hayden White’s analyses of historians’ writings are dismissed as ‘defensive protections of the historical discipline’, something which would surprise the many historians such as Elton and Marwick who have seen them in a rather different light. Like many postmodemists, Cohen vastly underestimates the critical capacity of people who read history, and hugely overestimates the historian’s ability to discipline the reader’s thought, even by the use of ‘tutelary narration’. By contrast, other versions of postmodernist thought, at the opposite extreme, claim that the reader’s ability to impose meaning on narratives is unlimited. Neither the totally passive nor the hyper-active reader of the rival theorists’ imagination comes near the reality.

Many historical narratives have set out to provide historical justification or inspiration for political and social movements in the present. Reading and writing about the feminist struggle for equal rights and human dignity for women in the nineteenth century in no way closes off the possibility of contemplating women’s situation in the present, rather the contrary, in fact, which is why present-day feminists have devoted so much attention to them. It is quite wrong to see narratives as constricting and essentially reactionary myths that have little to do with historical truth. The official historiography of Soviet Russia and the Eastern bloc was, in the view of the French originator of this particular critique, Jean-Francois Lyotard, a ‘master-narrative’, imposed and sanctified by the state. What he termed ‘local narratives’ were by contrast forms of resistance, individual stories told by prisoners, students, peasants and deviants of various kinds, impossible to incorporate into the state’s version of events, and thus directly subversive of it. Unlike the master-narrative, local narratives did not claim omniscience or universal validity, and they were subjective rather than laying claim to objective historical truth. Hence history in general consisted and should consist - of a mass of local histories. ‘Postmodernism’ indeed was defined by Lyotard simply as ‘incredulity toward master-narratives’. But it is not true to say, as Lyotard tended to, that master-narratives are the hegemonic stories told by those in power. The Marxist master-narrative itself, in many different variants, was developed over decades by an oppressed minority. The same may be said of the master-narratives of feminist history, or gay history, or black history. Master-narratives do not have to be oppressive.

Historians in general have not only always been active in constructing local narratives or counter-narratives, they have also taken special pleasure in attacking master-narratives of every kind. Sir Geoffrey Elton was particularly insistent on the historian’s duty in this respect. Many historians have seen their task not so much in creating narratives as in destroying them. ‘Ever since historical study became professional,’ Elton declared towards the end of his life, ‘- that is to say, systematic, thorough and grounded in the sources it has time and again destroyed just those interpretations that served particular interests, more especially national self-esteem and self-confidence.’ The continued prevalence of national historical myths in the Third World was for him a matter for regret. ‘The world is now in the hands of adolescents,’ he complained. ‘Historians,’ Theodore Zeldin, echoing Elton in his own, less apocalyptic manner, proclaimed, ‘are the counterpart of the social scientists; they say what cannot be done, rather than what should be done. Their function is less glamorous than that of the soothsayer. They are only court jesters.’ It was a function of the court jester in medieval times not only to entertain and amuse, but also to tell his audience unpalatable truths. History has always been seen by historians as a destroyer of myths more than a creator of them.

In destroying myths, historians have often sought to substitute for them narratives which are more closely grounded in the sources. But narrative is by no means the dominant mode of historical representation among contemporary historians that postmodernists, fixated on the great narrative histories of the nineteenth century, like to claim it is. Indeed, the sequential presentation of historical material has often been entirely abandoned by modern historical scholarship, under the influence of the social sciences. Probably the majority of histories, other than introductory textbooks in the last three or four decades, have done their best to avoid having their structure shaped by the passage of time, and this is even more true of articles and theses. Moreover, some of the most famous history books of the earlier part of the century have avoided narrative too: Namier’s Structure of Politics sought to uncover the deep and relatively unchanging structures which underlay the surface froth of events. Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, even Wehler’s Kaiserreich were all structural histories in which the passage of time was either frozen and change consigned to periods before and after the moment being studied, or abolished altogether in a deliberate assertion of grand continuities. The first injunction history tutors give their students is ‘avoid narrative’; thematic analysis gets the grades, a priority which reflects wider beliefs about the presentation and communication of research and scholarship at every level in the twentieth-century historical profession.
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"historicity" - how to assess it?

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"How to assess 'historicity'" -- one more time . . . .

1. Look for "provenance": is the work I am reading by someone who is in a position to know? Who is telling me this stuff? Who are they? Why should I take them seriously?

2. Look for verification: so they say stuff. Why should I believe it? Why are they telling me this stuff? How can I check out their claims?

3. What are their sources? Do they just say stuff for the hell-of-it or to impress me with their ability to create a fantastic image? Where is all of this stuff coming from?

I have posed the above questions in various ways here and elsewhere many times before. I am still waiting for serious engagement with the issues they raise.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Jun 29, 2017 5:52 pm
The question we are asking, I suppose, is what makes a plausible writing "fiction" versus "history"?
It is a relevant consideration, no more and no less.
It is what I take the very point of the OP to be about
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Neil
I have posed the above questions in various ways here and elsewhere many times before. I am still waiting for serious engagement with the issues they raise.
In our own case, that may be because we have different lists. You and I seem to have parted company at

0. Read the damn thing. What's actually on the page?

Apparently noticing things like (in Pliny's version) the 'female figure' alone describes herself as a goddess is "rationalizing" the story (which, whatever that means, is a bad thing to do, apparently, because it may lead me to think that Wonder Woman is a documentary).

And yet, isn't noticing this at least somewhat parallel to your own
2. Look for verification: so they say stuff. Why should I believe it? Why are they telling me this stuff?
So the 'female figure' says she's a goddess. Why should I believe it? Why is she telling anybody this stuff? ... I stopped quoting your item 2 there because I never reach "How can I check out their claims?' Why would I bother to "check out" what couldn't seriously be true?
It is what I take the very point of the OP to be about
OK, but if our long, long conversation has established anything it is that plausibility won't do the whole job. It will help (The Duchy of Grand Fenwick didn't bomb Pearl Harbor), but it won't be decisive (Did German naval intelligence provide the Imperial Navy with technical assistance in the planning of the attack on Pearl Harbor?).
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Fri Jun 30, 2017 4:36 am
Apparently noticing things like (in Pliny's version) the 'female figure' alone describes herself as a goddess is "rationalizing" the story .....
I don't think this is an accurate summary of what I said but I am willing to leave you with the last word on this discussion.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Neil
I don't think this is an accurate summary of what I said but I am willing to leave you with the last word on this discussion.
I appreciate the offer, but as I thought was clear, I don't know what you meant by "rationalizing." The last thing I thought I understood before I realized that I was lost was that rationalizing had something to do with my adversely evaluating the character's reported claim of divinity. Imagine my confusion compounded, therefore, when I read your item 2 coupled with a note that you hadn't been seriously engaged on it and the other items.

I'd rather have the explanation than the last word, but I'll settle for whichever you care to give.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Fri Jun 30, 2017 8:48 am The last thing I thought I understood before I realized that I was lost was that rationalizing had something to do with my adversely evaluating the character's reported claim of divinity. Imagine my confusion compounded, therefore, when I read your item 2 coupled with a note that you hadn't been seriously engaged on it and the other items.

I'd rather have the explanation than the last word, but I'll settle for whichever you care to give.

Which backtracks me to:
2. Look for verification: so they say stuff. Why should I believe it? Why are they telling me this stuff?
So the 'female figure' says she's a goddess. Why should I believe it? Why is she telling anybody this stuff? ...
I think we both recognize that our discussion interests very few others here so I do hesitate to respond.... Maybe our exchange could be taken to The Lounge or some other place?

In short, we are reading what an anonymous narrator (we have taken the story from the Pliny context) is telling us. The question, "why are they telling me this stuff?" is directed to that anonymous narrator. Why is he or she telling me the story?

My point is that without context we can never answer that: Maybe the anon narrator really believed it did happen just as told; or maybe he or she just wanted to entertain readers with a ghost-type story; or maybe the narrator was writing a parable or allegory the original meaning of which is now lost to us; or maybe it was not a ghost story but simply a lot of exaggeration and lucky coincidences; or maybe.....

We have no way of leaning the story towards fiction or towards history without some sort of context for the story.
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