Historians Can't Speculate Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Historians Cant Speculate - Essay ExampleYet when the historic records of an event such as American slavery tend to be biased towards the view of it as just a nonher type of economic enterprise, there is clear value in what might be termed memory or the an attempt to explore what actually occurred using the human imagination as a spur rather than actual historical records. Beloved is a prime example of such an attempt.Historians are come to with events which can be assigned to specific time-space locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas unreal writers . . . are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones.It is interesting to note that Whites definition provides for an area of coincidence surrounded by the work of the historian and the work of the imaginary writer (such as Morrison, who is a novelist) by suggesting that novelists deal with historical events as well as historians, although they may also include the fictional elements that the historian supposedly does not.As White suggests, it was after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that history and literature started to part company. By the first 1800s it became conventional, at least among historians, to identify trueness with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of the truth (White, p.123) (emphasis added). This might seem almost childishly simplistic to many scholars today, but it can be connect to the supposed triumph of the rational, often in the form of Science, over the irrational. The word science government agency to fill in (from the Latin scio, to know) and the only thing that can be known is a fact. Fiction was indeed a hindrance to the understanding of reality rather than as a way of apprehending it(White, p.123). History was thus fixed within a hierarchy that placed it indelibly above, and thus superior, to that of mere fiction. Many historians of this era did not seem to consider the fact that the histories which they were writing depended a lot upon which facts were being considered, and that this just as frequently choice and imagination went into writing them as in fiction. History dealt with facts, and thus the truth, while fiction dealt with non-facts, and thus lies. It was only during the Twentieth Century that history and fiction started their long journey back towards one another. In the Nineteenth Century historians did not realize that which seems self-evident today facts do not speak for themselves, but that the historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose whole integrity is - in its representation - a purely discursive one (White, p.125). It is this fashioning which makes history resemble the process a fictional writer goes through when she is creating a world of characters. The historian takes a historical event, for example, the Fall of the Bastille, and gives meaning to it by cre ating a kaleidoscope through which the event can be seen. The fact that the Bastille fell cannot be disputed what that falling means can be. Both history and fiction deal with meaning, and thus can be regarded as dissimilar techniques with the same end in mind.