The Historical Text as Literary Artifact

THE HISTORICAL TEXT AS LITERARY ARTIFACT One of the ways that a scholarly field takes stock of itself is by consider ing its history. Yet it is difficult to get an objective history of a scholarly discipline, because if the historian is himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to be a devotee of one or another of its sects and hence biased; and if he is not a practitioner, he is unlikely to have the expertise necessary to distin guish between the significant and the insignificant events of the field's development. One might think that these difficulties would not arise in the field of history itself, but they do and not only for the reasons mentioned above. In order to write the history of any given scholarly discipline or even of a science, one must be prepared to ask questions about it of a sort that de not have to be asked in the practice of it. One must try to get behind of beneath the presuppositions which sustain a given type of inquiry and ash the questions that can be begged in its practice in the interest of determin ing why this type of inquiry has been designed to solve the problems i characteristically tries to solve. This is what metahistory seeks to do. It ad dresses itself to such questions as, What is the structure of a peculiarly his-torical consciousness? What is the epistemological status of historical expla nations, as compared with other kinds of explanations that might be offered to account for the materials with which historians ordinarily deal? What are the possible forms of historical representation and what are their bases? What authority can historical accounts claim as contributions to a secured knowledge of reality in general and to the human sciences in particular? Now, many of these questions have been dealt with quite competently histo over the last quarter-century by philosophers cor relationships to other disciplines, especially the physical and social sciences, and by historians interested in assessing the success of their discipline in mapping the past and determining the relationship of that past to the pres-ent. But there is one problem that neither philosophers nor historians have looked at very seriously and to which literary theorists have given only pass-ing attention. This question has to do with the status of the historical nar-rative, considered purely as a verbal artifact purporting to be a model of structures and processes long past and therefore not subject to either experi-mental or observational controls. This is not to say that historians and philosophers of history have failed to take notice of the essentially provi-sional and contingent nature of historical representations and of their sus-ceptibility to infinite revision in the light of new evidence or more sophisti-cated conceptualization of problems. One of the marks of a good profes-sional historian is the consistency with which he reminds his readers of the purely provisional nature of his characterizations of events, agents, and agencies found in the always incomplete historical record. Nor is it to say that literary theorists have never studied the structure of historical narratives. But in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have mote in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences. Now, it is obvious that this conflation of mythic and historical con-sciousness will offend some historians and disturb those literary theorists whose conception of literature presupposes a radical opposition of history to fiction or of fact to fancy. As Northrop Frye has remarked, "In a sense the historical is the opposite of the mythical, and to tell the historian that what gives shape to his book is a myth would sound to him vaguely insulting." Yet Frye himself grants that "when a historian's scheme gets to a certain point of comprehensiveness it becomes mythical in shape, and so approaches the poetic in its structure. He even speaks of different kinds of historical myths: Romantic myths "based on a quest or pilgrimage to a City of God or classless society Comic "myths of progress through evolution or revolu-tion"; Tragic myths of "decline and fall, like the works of Gibbon and Spengler"; and Ironic "myths of recurrence or casual catastrophe." But Frye appears to believe that these myths are operative only in such victims of what might be called the "poctic fallacy" as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sartre historians whose fascination with the "constructive" capacity of human thought has deadened their responsibility to the "found" data. "The historian works inductively, he says, "collecting his facts and trying to avoid any informing patterns except those he sees, or is honestly convinced he sees, in the facts themselves." He does not work "from" a "unifying form," as the poet does, but "toward" it; and it therefore follows that the historian, like any writer of discursive prose, is to be judged "by the truth of what he says, or by the adequacy of his verbal reproduction of his external model," whether that external model be the ac-tions of past men or the historian's own thought about such actions. What Frye says is true enough as a statement of the ideal that has in-spired historical writing since the time of the Greeks, but that ideal presup-poses an opposition between myth and history that is as problematical as it is venerable. It serves Frye's purposes very well, since it permits him to locate the specifically "fictive" in the space between the two concepts of the "mythic" and the "historical." As readers of Frye's Anatomy of Criticism will remember, Frye conceives fictions to consist in part of sublimates of ar-chetypal myth-structures. These structures have been displaced to the in-terior of verbal artifacts in such a way as to serve as their latent meanings. The fundamental meanings of all fictions, their thematic content, consist, in Frye's view, of the "pre-generic plot-structures" or mythoi derived from the corpora of Classical and Judaeo-Christian religious literature. According to this theory, we understand why a particular story has "turned out" as it has when we have identified the archetypal myth, or pregeneric plot structure, of which the story is an exemplification. And we see the "point" of a story when we have identified its theme (Frye's translation of dianoia), which makes of it a "parable or illustrative fable." "Every work of literature, Frye insists, "has both a fictional and a thematic aspect," but as we move from "fictional projection" toward the overt articulation of theme, the writing tends to take on the aspect of "direct address, or straight discursive writing and cease(s) to be literature. And in Frye's view, as we have seen, history (or at least "proper history") belongs to the category of "discursive writing," so that when the fictional element-or mythic plot structure-is obviously present in it, it ceases to be history altogether and becomes a bastard genre, product of an unholy, though not unnatural, union between history and poetry.