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

[andrewcriddle]

But [have] you have no response to the Evans' passage in which he indicates that White himself in at least one instance retreated from the position that was the primary point of your OP?)

I think I might have already done this before, but probably a good time ago. I do remember responding to a charge that White's approach opened the door to Holocaust denier nonsense. Now I was motivated by that one, simply because, as a child, I saw a stack of original photos of corpses, apparently at a death camp. They were very similar to the ones that can be seen on documentaries and newsreels and such.

They appeared to be more than just photographic prints because many still possessed fragments of the apparatus they used to use to make prints directly from the film frames used by the cameras (unfortunately a subject I am not really knowledgeable about). There were 3-4 types of these apparatus.

I never asked my dad about these, but he did have an older brother who was killed in action in WW2 (the Battle of the Bulge) and I assumed that they came to us by way of him. I do not know what he did in the service, maybe a documentary unit, but in that particular battle (at least at Bastogne), every man including those at the "rear" were handed a rifle and made a temporary rifleman, simply because there was no longer a "rear". I'm sure a fair number of clerks, cooks, supply chain drivers and documentary photographers were casualties of that battle.

I'll try to touch on this when I can respond.

DCH

Inmates of concentration camps had been half starved over a long period. In the last months of the war the supply of food to concentration camps broke down causing tens of thousands (maybe more) deaths from starvation and associated disease. The photos of corpses at camps are witness to this tragedy.

Holocaust deniers do not usually question that these and other ugly events happened. IIUC they would mostly agree that hundreds of thousands of Jews were either directly killed by the Nazis or died as a result of ill treatment. What they (wrongly) deny is that the Jews were victims of genocide, deliberate organised mass murder. As part of this (false) position they deny the existence of the gas chambers and crematoria by which several million Jews and others were poisoned and then incinerated.

Andrew Criddle

[neilgodfrey]

I was reporting on the policies of the opposition, you can speak for the government

Not sure if you were addressing this to me, but if you read the bulk of the Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, not just a couple of paragraphs, you will see that the idea that history is merely educated opinion is closer to the views of those who hold the power, who support the government, than it is of the oppressed to whom he would give voice.

That is also closer to the view of Richard Evans. Just quoting-mining a few snippets out of context from books you haven't read and where the authors are actually setting up arguments to oppose as unjust or invalid is not the way to make your point.

[neilgodfrey]

Holocaust deniers do not usually question that these and other ugly events happened. IIUC they would mostly agree that hundreds of thousands of Jews were either directly killed by the Nazis or died as a result of ill treatment. What they (wrongly) deny is that the Jews were victims of genocide, deliberate organised mass murder. As part of this (false) position they deny the existence of the gas chambers and crematoria by which several million Jews and others were poisoned and then incinerated.

Andrew Criddle

Fwiw, Richard Evans' report for the David Irving trial -- in which he sets out his definition of the Holocaust and addresses specific arguments -- can be read at http://www.phdn.org/negation/irving/EvansReport.pdf

When the Irving controversy was still top news I read Irving's two volume work and couldn't understand what the fuss was about -- until I read Evans' report and learned that I had only read the first edition and he made major modifications to the second edition that I had not read.

[iskander]

I was reporting on the policies of the opposition, you can speak for the government

...
Just quoting-mining a few snippets out of context from books you haven't read and where the authors are actually setting up arguments to oppose as unjust or invalid is not the way to make your point.

RJE , In defence of History
Afterword page254
"
"The criticism came from many different angles . Critics seemed to disagree fundamentally about many of its [ RJE's book] central theses. Such disagreements raise once more the question of how far the readers put meaning into a text , and how far an author is able to limit the variety of meanings people put into it. Thus a response to the book's critics raises yet again some significant issues about meaning, interpretation and evidence in the general sense."


'Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in'


NB. History is an educated opinion

[neilgodfrey]

RJE , In defence of History
Afterword page254
"
"The criticism came from many different angles . Critics seemed to disagree fundamentally about many of its [ RJE's book] central theses. Such disagreements raise once more the question of how far the readers put meaning into a text , and how far an author is able to limit the variety of meanings people put into it. Thus a response to the book's critics raises yet again some significant issues about meaning, interpretation and evidence in the general sense.". . . .

NB. History is an educated opinion

If you read the entire book with basic comprehension Evans is very clear about the place of "meaning" attributed to events by historians and that history is by no means merely 'educated opinion'.

[neilgodfrey]

Hayden White opened this thread and I have some further words of White that go to the heart of what I think is of most interest to members here.

My impression is that most of us are interested in questions of factual events, whether such and such actually happened, or if so and so thought or did such and such, (or if a certain X actually existed)...

These are not "historical" questions that White addresses in the points made at the beginning of this thread. White is addressing what he believes is a fundamental flaw in narrative history (history, for him, by definition being a narrative). I think comparatively few New Testament scholars address questions of narrative history and focus more on forensic questions about what happened, who thought what, etc. (Probably the main exception is those who try to write about why Jesus was crucified, asking what events or "plot" led to the crucifixion.)

White, at least in a 1987 essay of his that I have just completed reading, does not dispute the "historicity" or "factness" of past events -- or our ability to know about them as "real events". But he does not see such a process as knowing "history". History is a narrative story for White. (I agree with that point but not with all the layers of meaning White imputes to that statement.)

White writes in his chapter titled "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory" in The Content of Form,. . .

After saying that a historical narrative is a type of "allegory", he clarifies:

This is not to say that a historical discourse is not properly assessed in terms of the truth value of its factual (singular existential) statements taken individually and the logical conjunction of the whole set of such statements taken distributively. . . . But such assessment touches only that aspect of the historical discourse conventionally called its chronicle [i.e. a mere record of a list of things that happened]

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form (p. 45). Johns Hopkins University Press. Kindle Edition.

He then gives an example of the sort of "history" that he denies has objective validity, by saying that we have no way to test "the truth value" of the following "historical narrative excerpt":

the assertion by Marx that the events of “the 18th Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte” constitute a “farcical” reenactment of the “tragedy” of 1789?

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form (p. 46). Johns Hopkins University Press. Kindle Edition.

That is quite different from being able to test the "truth" of, say, the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789.

In his next chapter, "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation", he underlines the same point. He clearly accepts "facts" of the past such as, yes, the Holocaust (that he discusses) as well as other examples

more remote in time —the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Wars of Religion, the Crusades, the Inquisition . . .

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form (p. 78). Johns Hopkins University Press. Kindle Edition.

The existence, the factness, the reality, of these past events is not disputed or denied. They are not fiction.

White's argument is with history understood as an extended narrative, with the meanings we see in these events.

[iskander]

RJE , In defence of History
Afterword page254
"
"The criticism came from many different angles . Critics seemed to disagree fundamentally about many of its [ RJE's book] central theses. Such disagreements raise once more the question of how far the readers put meaning into a text , and how far an author is able to limit the variety of meanings people put into it. Thus a response to the book's critics raises yet again some significant issues about meaning, interpretation and evidence in the general sense.". . . .

NB. History is an educated opinion

If you read the entire book with basic comprehension ...

Evans' is only a book written to defend one kind of history. I respect his very educated opinion.
NB. History is an educated opinion

[lpetrich]

A curious argument that some Xian apologists make is that the Gospels resemble in structure various ancient biographies. But then again, ancient historians had composed biographies of people whose historical existence is doubtful at best. In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch has biographies of Theseus, Romulus, Lycurgus, and Numa Pompilius, alongside biographies of much better documented people like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.

Are the Gospels Ancient Biographies?: The Spectrum of Ancient Βίοι | Κέλσος

A major problem in defining the genre of Graeco-Roman biography is the wide and diverse variety of biographical exampla that have come down to us from antiquity.

They vary widely in length and in contents, among other things, and it has been difficult to break them down into well-defined types of biographies. That is not for lack of trying, however. Like this:

Berger has attempted to combine the typologies of Leo and Wherli by suggesting that bioi be divided as follows: 1) Encomium: following the practice of speeches given to honor an individual at death; 2) Peripatetic: as a chronological presentation of a subject’s life; 3) Popular-Novelistic: written for entertainment; and 4) Alexandrian: a systematic/topical presentation of the life of an individual…

So all that the Gospels have in common with them is that the Gospels are also biographies.

[lpetrich]

A similar Xian-apologist argument is that there was no genre of fiction in antiquity. However, Ancient Greek novel:

Five ancient Greek novels survive complete from antiquity: Chariton's Callirhoe (mid-1st century), Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon (early-2nd century), Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century), Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Tale (late-2nd century), and Heliodorus of Emesa's Aethiopica (third century). There are also numerous fragments[1] preserved on papyrus or in quotations, and summaries by Photius a 9th-century Ecumenical Patriarch. The unattributed Metiochus and Parthenope may be preserved by what appears to be a faithful Persian translation by the poet Unsuri.[2] The Greek novel as a genre began in the first century CE, and flourished in the first four centuries; it is thus a product of the Roman Empire. The exact relationship between the Greek novel and the Latin novels of Petronius and Apuleius is debated, but both Roman writers are thought by most scholars to have been aware of and to some extent influenced by the Greek novels.

...
There are no clear distinctions of genre between the five 'romantic' novels and other works of Greek prose fiction, such as Lucian's A True Story, the Alexander Romance and the Life of Aesop.

[Secret Alias]

But now that you bring up Lucian, is satire 'history'? Is, for instance, the Passing of Peregrinus a(n) historical account of a philosopher named Peregrinus? Is it proper to identify the narrative as 'historical'?