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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lpetrich wrote: Fri Aug 04, 2017 10:17 am From Introduction: Was Christianity Too Improbable to be False?, by Richard Carrier, Would the Facts Be Checked? Note 5:
. . . . Yet Herodotus reports without a hint of doubt that, just a generation or two before he wrote, . . . a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon; a horse gave birth to a rabbit. . . . ).
No, Herodotus does not report that the flood-tide was "miraculous" at all. He reports it as an entirely natural event. He says that the timing of this "natural" event was ordained by the gods as punishment for sacrilege and H says he believes it -- not, like the omniscient novelist who knows what's going on up in heaven, that God sent it.

Even the interpretation of the reason for this natural event is given as a report, not like a novelist saying "God dit it." The historian says he believes a report he hears and allows readers to know the status of his belief; the novelist simply says God, a character, did X and Y.
This is how Timoxenus' treachery was brought to light. But when Artabazus had besieged Potidaea for three months, there was a great ebb-tide in the sea which lasted for a long while, and when the foreigners saw that the sea was turned to a marsh, they prepared to pass over it into Pallene.

[2] When they had made their way over two-fifths of it, however, and three yet remained to cross before they could be in Pallene, there came a great flood-tide, higher, as the people of the place say, than any one of the many that had been before. Some of them who did not know how to swim were drowned, and those who knew were slain by the Potidaeans, who came among them in boats.

[3] The Potidaeans say that the cause of the high sea and flood and the Persian disaster lay in the fact that those same Persians who now perished in the sea had profaned the temple and the image of Poseidon which was in the suburb of the city. I think that in saying that this was the cause they are correct. Those who escaped alive were led away by Artabazus to Mardonius in Thessaly. This is how the men who had been the king's escort fared.
But there is one example in all of those listed that is indeed reported as fact:
When all had passed over and were ready for the road, a great portent appeared among them. Xerxes took no account of it, although it was easy to interpret: a mare gave birth to a hare. The meaning of it was easy to guess: Xerxes was to march his army to Hellas with great pomp and pride, but to come back to the same place fleeing for his life.

[2] There was another portent that was shown to him at Sardis: a mule gave birth to a mule that had double genitals, both male and female, the male above the other. But he took no account of either sign and journeyed onward; the land army was with him.
So we have it. Of all the passages that were listed as examples of how Herodotus supposedly writes like an omniscient novelist that miracles just happen because God orders them to as if that's a fact -- of all the examples we do have this one that is actually valid.

And I did not bother to go through listing examples from Herodotus myself to support my own case because I assumed that anyone who has read H knows what he writes and how he writes it. There are scores of examples. Occasionally, however, Herodotus does indeed slip into the standard literary trope of reporting prodigies just prior to a great disaster as if they were fact.

I suggest that such instances are the exception rather than the rule.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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lpetrich wrote: Fri Aug 04, 2017 7:26 pm I wasn't sure whether Aceratus's account of the temple arms being moved would really qualify as a miracle, since it's too easy for someone to do. But it is clearly an indirect mention.

So instead of being all-direct, like the Gospels, or all-indirect, Herodotus's accounts of miracles are some of both.
No no no no. H reports Aceratus's experience as a miracle. You can't play the rationalising game and see how you can change his story to make it say something else. He reports it as a miracle.

But he goes on to say that the miracle was something that was told to him by others, that it was believed among such and such, etc.
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lpetrich
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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I will concede that about Aceratus's report, although it looks almost like some temple assistant playing a practical joke on him. It didn't seem as farfetched as a horse giving birth to a rabbit or a resurrection of cooked fish or a just-in-time tsunami.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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lpetrich wrote: Fri Aug 04, 2017 8:29 pm I will concede that about Aceratus's report, although it looks almost like some temple assistant playing a practical joke on him. It didn't seem as farfetched as a horse giving birth to a rabbit or a resurrection of cooked fish or a just-in-time tsunami.
I agree with your point. And Herodotus expresses elsewhere a sceptical attitude towards such stories.

But in the context here we are talking about Apollo's main temple. Herodotus's entire history is a demonstration of the power and will of Apollo being worked out in the affairs of earthly mortals. The logic of his tale requires miraculous displays of Apollo's power when that critical moment in the plot arrives. In fact the miracles Herodotus reports are quite similar both in tone and some of the details to Josephus's list of miracles that come as a sign of impending doom for the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE.

It would ruin the whole dramatic narrative and climax of the story if Herodotus let his narrative voice cast suspicion on the reality of Apollo's/God's power.

The point is that H wants to come across as a historian, a reporter, not as a novelist or a poet. So he reminds readers that he is reporting what he has heard from others, thus enabling readers to contextualize the information they are hearing and not merely take it all in undigested as from a "just so/this is what happened" novel.

Interestingly Josephus at a similar juncture in his story of the Jerusalem temple adopts the same mix of credulity (a cow giving birth to a lamb) and reportage (a great noise coming from the temple itself-- just as Herodotus had reported of Delphi)....
At the same festival also an heifer, as she was led by the High-priest to be sacrificed, brought forth a lamb, in the midst of the temple. . . . . Besides these, a few days after that feast, on the one and twentieth day of the month Artemisius, [Jyar,] a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared: I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable; were it not related by those that saw it; and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals. For, before sun setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armour were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities. Moreover, at that feast which we call Pentecost; as the priests were going by night into the inner [court of the] temple, as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said, that in the first place they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise: and after that they heard a sound, as of a multitude, saying, “Let us remove hence.”
Notice that Josephus admits (the underlined portion) to the reader that he needs to bring in miraculous events when discussing something as dramatic as the fall of God's Temple.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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This may or may not be relevant for the more recent posts on this thread, but I was reminded of "fake news" when I recently heard someone on the radio(?) quoting several sources that described the propaganda war that was going in Spain just prior to WW2.

In newspapers, battles that never happened were described in vivid detail, others that did occur passed over in silence, and when papers with opposite political leaning covered the same battle or event, they would have wildly differing details that, when the various primary records could be accessed, did not even closely correspond to them in detail. Accounts were often spun in favor of, or to vilify, well known figures associated with the various sides.

With propaganda being way more important than truth, it was possible for journalists who came to support one side or the other to be chased across the country by squads of troops rom that same party tasked with their "arrest" (= summary execution) for "treason." Their treason was giving a fair account of the battles or events, which did not agree with the "official" version offered by the various sides in the conflict.

I think I heard this on USA based National Public Radio (aka NPR), but I am too lazy to look it up on their website. Or it may have been one of those maddening "newspaper" websites that load 1,000 advertising programs before they will let you see what you clicked to see. It takes so long to load them for each and every page you look at that I usually loose interest after the first or maybe second ones.

Of course, we all have super fast computers, don't we?

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

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Real people can be subject to mythmaking, sometimes on a massive scale. Like Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie over half a century ago by the Rastafarian sect of Jamaica -- that sect turned him into a messiah figure. I once saw that as an argument as to how there can be a historical Jesus Christ along with the Gospels being largely unhistorical.

Patterns of Myth-Making Between the Lives of Alexander the Great and Jesus Christ | Κέλσος

He works from a biography of AtG, The Alexander Romance ( Alexander romance). That biography was very popular over the Middle Ages, and it was translated into numerous languages during that time. Some of it even found its way into the Koran (18:83-98). It also got a lot of variations, with five different Greek versions surviving.

Nobody knows when it was written, but some of the unhistorical parts of it may date back to the time of AtG himself.
One of the sources used by the Romance is Onesicritus, who was a personal traveling companion of Alexander, who nevertheless claimed that Alexander had met with mythical Amazonian warriors on his journeys. As B.P. Reardon (Collected Ancient Greek Novels, pg. 651) points out, “It comes as a shock to realize how quickly historians fictionalized Alexander.”
The first surviving version contains such unhistorical incidents as AtG going to Rome, and later versions include AtG going to even more places, including farfetched ones that Matthew Ferguson does not consider literally true.
The most common form of myth-making seen between Alexander and Jesus is the modeling of their characters upon previous heroic archetypes.
  • AtG: Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus, ...
  • JC: Moses, David, Elijah, Elisha, ...
Both AtG and JC are also described as having gods as quasi-biological fathers, quasi-biological because those deities made those heroes' mothers pregnant in nonsexual ways. Zeus with a bolt of lightning and the Xian God with his holy breath, a.k.a. the Holy Spirit.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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DCHindley wrote: Sat Aug 05, 2017 6:21 am This may or may not be relevant for the more recent posts on this thread, but I was reminded of "fake news" when I recently heard someone on the radio(?) quoting several sources that described the propaganda war that was going in Spain just prior to WW2.

In newspapers, battles that never happened were described in vivid detail, others that did occur passed over in silence, and when papers with opposite political leaning covered the same battle or event, they would have wildly differing details that, when the various primary records could be accessed, did not even closely correspond to them in detail. Accounts were often spun in favor of, or to vilify, well known figures associated with the various sides.

With propaganda being way more important than truth, it was possible for journalists who came to support one side or the other to be chased across the country by squads of troops rom that same party tasked with their "arrest" (= summary execution) for "treason." Their treason was giving a fair account of the battles or events, which did not agree with the "official" version offered by the various sides in the conflict.

I think I heard this on USA based National Public Radio (aka NPR), but I am too lazy to look it up on their website. Or it may have been one of those maddening "newspaper" websites that load 1,000 advertising programs before they will let you see what you clicked to see. It takes so long to load them for each and every page you look at that I usually loose interest after the first or maybe second ones.

Of course, we all have super fast computers, don't we?

DCH
No need for a superfast computer. You were reading one of George Orwell's essays:
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’
What he reports there, as I understand so many reports from war zones, has long been standard operating procedure for the reporting of many conflicts. Always look for the source of any story from a war zone and ask questions about it before accepting anything it says, usually only when/if confirmed some years later. Come to think of it, why stop doing that outside war zones?

A famous war correspondent who reported on Australian forces in World War 1 for Australian newspapers is known to have experienced the same sorts of things. In his official capacity he was obliged to lie, fabricate, distort, suppress -- and he produced the "official" history of Australia in WW1.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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lpetrich wrote: Sat Aug 05, 2017 6:38 am Real people can be subject to mythmaking, sometimes on a massive scale. Like Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie over half a century ago by the Rastafarian sect of Jamaica -- that sect turned him into a messiah figure. I once saw that as an argument as to how there can be a historical Jesus Christ along with the Gospels being largely unhistorical.
Certainly, and we have media agents being used to fabricate mythical images of political leaders in our own countries right now.

There is a difference between a historical person who has been mythologized and a figure who is mythical from the get-go.

Alexander is said to have imitated Dionysus by conquering as far as India (the god Dionysus in myth did the same). But there are many historical details, including archaeological remains, testifying to Alexander's conquest that cannot be explained by the myth. The myth is tacked on to the historical details. The emperor Hadrian is said to have imitated Hercules: he liked to wear a lion's skin cloak in imitation, we are told. But we know so much more about Hadrian that the mythical association with Hercules cannot explain.

But if a figure consists of nothing but details that can in every case be associated with a myth, then we don't have any reason, any grounds, for thinking that figure was historical. He may have been historical and unfortunately everything he did just happened to be covered by a mythical tale. That's unfortunate, because that person is lost to history -- unless there is some external or independent evidence to testify to his existence.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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DCHindley wrote: Sat Aug 05, 2017 6:21 am This may or may not be relevant for the more recent posts on this thread, but I was reminded of "fake news" when I recently heard someone on the radio(?) quoting several sources that described the propaganda war that was going in Spain just prior to WW2.

In newspapers, battles that never happened were described in vivid detail, others that did occur passed over in silence, and when papers with opposite political leaning covered the same battle or event, they would have wildly differing details that, when the various primary records could be accessed, did not even closely correspond to them in detail. Accounts were often spun in favor of, or to vilify, well known figures associated with the various sides.

With propaganda being way more important than truth, it was possible for journalists who came to support one side or the other to be chased across the country by squads of troops rom that same party tasked with their "arrest" (= summary execution) for "treason." Their treason was giving a fair account of the battles or events, which did not agree with the "official" version offered by the various sides in the conflict. . . .
neilgodfrey wrote: Sat Aug 05, 2017 7:57 am
George Orwell's essays:
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’
Not dissimilar is something by John Pilger in an article that appeared online yesterday:
A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls “an eternal present”. Harold Pinter described this as “manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
Genre sets up an understanding between reader and author. The history genre informs the reader to expect the author is presenting the contents of his discussion (not always a narrative) in good faith as what he believes to be an honest attempt at representation of "what essentially happened" or an understanding of or explanation for "what happened".

But as in any human exchange, we always have cases of deceivers, charlatans, hoodwinkers, liars, well-meaning idiots acting as pawns of others, manipulators. There is no rule that guarantees exposure of deceivers or deceivers and would have ceased to exist long ago. Sometimes a novel, the fiction genre, can give a more honest and truthful account of reality than some works written in the genre of history give. (Paul has been arguing that point strenuously but I have to depart company with him on the conclusions he draws from the fact that there are some novels like that.)

In the context of propaganda posing as history, if the question is not about genre but about how we can know if X really happened or was fabricated, then we have forensics, testing -- not very different in principle from the way detectives work. Sometimes they make mistakes through misinterpretation of evidence. Sometimes they leave a crime unsolved through insufficient evidence.
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Paul the Uncertain
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Neil
Sometimes a novel, the fiction genre, can give a more honest and truthful account of reality than some works written in the genre of history give. (Paul has been arguing that point strenuously but I have to depart company with him on the conclusions he draws from the fact that there are some novels like that.)
Well, then, we agree in part and disagree in part. That's par for the course out here on the wild, wild web.

In the big picture, it is more important IMO to agree that we can't reliably assess the truth of a message from the message alone, than to thumb-wrestle over how confidently we can estimate that some author wished to be called a historian.
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