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F ICTIONALIZED H ISTORY,
H ISTORICIZED F ICTION:
T WO P EAS IN A P OD
Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects to any other point, and its traits are not necessar-ily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. […] It is composed not of units, but of dimensions, or rather direc-tions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Int roduc tio n
DELEUZE’S AND GUATTARI’S TEXTdepicts a synthetic picture of communica-tive praxis that pulses with vitality, and which I think captures some of the contours of my analysis thus far. We have covered a number of topics in the last three chapters, crossing epistemological frontiers, conjoining latitudes of understanding and
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gressing borders of historicality, consciousness studies and narrative composition.
These conceptions might, in light of Deleuze and Guattari, be called “dimensions” of our topics, dimensions of historical and conscious apprehension, amidst a galaxy of aesthetic conceptions. There are, however, yet more philosophical, aesthetic and em-pirical tailings we must excavate and assay—as we have thus far seen, human history with all its fecund interpretive possibilities is a fecund and varied ground, with multi-ple points of view converging onto commulti-plete historical apprehension. Our topic, it seems, are as wide as conscious experience, historical consciousness, and narrative structure, and thus my claims have at times been bold. Such an expansive environ-ment is no doubt bound to highlight a few less-than-concrete points and generate some abstract analyses, and this may, I suspect, be giving rise to some dissension and skepticism. In sum we may find ourselves navigating amidst some misunderstandings and misapprehensions, hotly debatable points, ambiguities, surprising discernment, and at times even some straightforward rejection. I can only say: So be it. I will repeat that I believe that I am “onto something” in this analysis, and it is my hope that I am exposing valuable contours bounding our topics, which, perhaps ideally, are fruitfully merging within overlapping, multi-focal ellipses of understanding.
With this said, let me proceed into my analysis, pursuing lines of thought that will add flesh to the bones of this theory. I will begin with several topics that will deepen our understanding of certain abstract themes that condition history and histori-cal narrative. From there I will move toward our primary quarry in this chapter: an analysis of aesthetic interdependencies, elements and functions that condition histori-cal/lived experience and in turn provide the veritable fodder for historical narrative. I will list again here the particular aesthetic conceptions I will be examining: 1) imagi-nation; 2) point of view; 3) fictionalizing techniques; 4) becoming and
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man; 5) heteroglossia and intertextuality; 6) contingency, metaphor and a conception of chaos in history; 7) temporality; 8) and rhetorical thrusts in historical narrative. We will find, I trust, a veritable ferment of “aesthetic interdependencies between histori-cal writing and other forms of cultural knowledge” (Classen and Kansteiner 2), with a galvanizing interaction and fruitful cross-pollination lacing historical experience and the composition and receipt of fictional and non-fictional historical writings.108 At one level a move like this is somewhat emancipatory, and provides readers with breathing room and distance while they consume historical narrative. As Ankersmit’s theory of disconnecting ourselves from the past by way of its objectification posits, historical writers “put the past to bed,” and bring an end to (or at least reduce) the past’s some-times-burdensome impact on the present. We might take a view such that by way of cognitive play during consumption, fictional histories (particularly) relieve readers of some of the constraints of materialist language and logic (as generally found in non-fiction history), and this, along with any other sportive qualities of narrative, can be seen as weakening more ironclad epistemological holds on our apprehension and in-terpretation of history (in the way that Ankersmit sought to break apart the crusts of prior experience and expectation that obscure our view onto prior experience, ena-bling sublime, direct contact with historicality). In these lights I am reminded of up-roarious examples of fictional narrative play—such as Remarque’s Paul Bäumer fir-ing sfir-ingle-syllable insults like a machine gun trained on the despised Himmelstoss:
“You lump, you hound, you skunk, sneak out of it would you? You cow, you swine”
[127]). We will examine other examples of hilarity in historical narratives below.
Here we perhaps in sum see “history as discourse rather than as discipline,” as Hay-den White has said (“The Aim of Interpretation” 67). To conclude and paint a meta-phorical picture that returns to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s imagery, we will find in the
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following analysis common aesthetic roots twining through the “soil” of historical writing, providing a common nutrition to narrative saplings that become the mighty trees that provide the timbers that go into the construction of historiography and his-torical fiction.
Crossing Bo undari es
I WILL BEGIN IN A seemingly pragmatic place, which links works of the gen-res we are examining within the very actuality of received history, in strong and what are considered to be reliable, constructive and accurate ways. I mean the use of fic-tional works within historiography, used to bolster analysis and the stories told, and to condition non-fiction history in subtle ways. Such a technique is a common enough in historiography—surprisingly common, considering the beating that fiction takes at the hands of many historians. Truly, this strikes me as peculiar—fictional “lies” used to support authentic, empirical historical data. I have shown one such instance of this conception in the work of Daniel Boorstin, in chapter 1. Another useful example is James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, which depends for a portion of its analysis of anti-slavery activism and the fugitive slave law on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s narrative, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a fictional work with representations “more real than life” (89), which catapulted debate of slavery in the U.S. into the limelight.
This fictional work functions as an important indicator of fact in McPherson’s narra-tive, showing how slavery was understood in the U.S. in the time before the Civil War in ways that straightforward empirical interpretation could not. McPherson also em-ploys various phrases steeped in fictionalization and allusion to fictions to convey his history, such as his descriptions of the southern economy as “like Alice in
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land” such that “the faster the South ran, the farther behind it seemed to fall” (95);
violent anti-slavery agitator John Brown with “the glint of a Biblical warrior in his eye” (84); the southern distortion that “freedom is not possible without slavery” (244) as an “Orwellian definition of liberty” (244); and the meeting of a “Lyon” and a
“Fox” in Missouri during the secession crisis that was “a confrontation of greater than Aesopian proportions” (290).109 McPherson also sprinkles many song lyrics and po-ems throughout his history, which of course is not unusual in historiography, but again points to the ambiguous use of fiction to convey historical fact. Writers of his-torical theory and analysis do the same thing, such as David Lowenthal (professor of geography, University College London), who in The Past is a Foreign Country refers to a panoply of literary sources to strengthen his empirical analysis, including works by Proust, Joyce, James, Hardy, Ibsen, Ballard, Hesse, Tennyson, Woolf, Bradbury and Orwell.110 I think we should keep in mind that works of fiction—novels, plays, poems, songs, etc.—can themselves count as historical artifacts and/or source docu-mentation, and this at a core level enables their use in historiography (and is some-thing of a reversal of the typical view of historiography as a fictional artifact—the view of Hayden White and his followers). All of the above may be understood in that, as Jackson Lears (Board of Governors Professor of History, Rutgers University) has written: “The most illuminating works of history are those governed by the most imaginative and capacious regulative fictions. […] [T]their chief distinguishing fea-ture is that they use regulative fictions flexibly to explain changes in human experi-ence” (Diggins para. 5).
I think what we see here again shows, if perhaps in an oblique way, the trans-action and surprisingly close relationship of fact and fiction in historical apprehension and narrative. The same could probably be said of journals, diaries, letters, etc.—also
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commonly used in non-fiction historical writing—in that these documents, far from being strictly impartial historical documents, likely have, by way of their remembered interior lines and self-created quality, something of the fictional about them, distilled through each writer’s consciousness and composition. (They are in this way an amal-gamation, such that “a constructivist approach describes memory as the combined in-fluences of the world and the person’s own ideas and expectations” [Foster 13]. Pro-fessor Hayden White, additionally, has told this author that “pragmatic writing […]
wishes to be factual but […] can be fictional as well” and—as we may say of the writ-ing of Anne Franke—“Not all literary writwrit-ing is fictional” [personal communication 10 September 2007]). Even more empirically, historian Peter Zarrow writes that
“elements of ‘fictionalization’ apply to all memoirs,” but even if Anne Frank “made up some [of her material], her ‘diary’ was really written by her; and so, it can be used by historians studying the 1940s”.)111 As well such narrative “is fictional because it is a construction and because it involves all manner of revisitation to past indetermina-cies [memory] and construction post facto” (Flanagan Consciousness Reconsidered 205). The moment works like these are employed in history writing this given fiction-alization conditions the factual genre in fairly substantial ways.112
The reverse of the above is also true, and we commonly find rich, accurate historical detail based on source documentation and other evidence employed in his-torical fictions. This work also evinces a unique simultaneity of the fictional and non-fictional, with speculated/invented, fictional dialog and points of view emerging out of the mouths and minds of historical, non-fictional characters. Lowenthal writes that
“The historical novelist […] heightens illusions at the expense of accuracy” (The Past is a Foreign Country 228), but I am not so sure this is necessarily true, and rather a
“heightened sense of the past” is evinced “which both history and literature grant to
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all who are truly involved with the mystery of human existence” (Ralph Ellison in Ellison 149; note also that Lowenthal also wrote that “The most pellucid pearls of his-torical narrative are often found in fiction, long a major component of hishis-torical un-derstanding” [224; I will cite this quote again below]). Simply put, works like Ca-pote’s In Cold Blood, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, or William Styron’s The Confes-sions of Nat Turner113 all contain meticulously researched historical details—details that match the work of professional historians, I warrant.114 I advise readers to scruti-nize these works, and after they have I believe they will walk away with substantial accurate knowledge about the experiences of soldiers and details about locations in the two world wars; the psychologies and acts of actual criminals, their victims and their pursuers in 20th century America; a birds-eye view of a legendary sporting event in the United States in the 1950s; or a crisply accurate picture of slave life in early 19th-century America. As historical novelist Jeff Shaara writes: “In my case, I’m tell-ing what I hope to be a fully accurate historical story, that is fictionalized by the use of specific characters, their thoughts, dialog and points of view. The narrative fills in the gaps” (personal communication with the author, 29 August 2009). To be sure in all of these works, as in any histories, readers must be on the lookout for inaccuracies, rhetorical overworking or bias on the parts of the novelists. But that’s simply a fun-damental requirement of historical apprehension. At best, however, we are going to see how these histories not only provide valuable, accurate historical information, but also enter into dialogical interaction with historiography and other avenues of histori-cal understanding and consciousness.
Jonathan D. Spence has referred to his use of the stories and drama of Chinese writer P’u Sung-ling in The Death of Woman Wang, saying that fictional works can
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effectively “supplement the more conventional historical and administrative writings”
and “penetrate[] into the realms of loneliness, sensuality, and dreams that were also part of T’an-Ch’eng” (both xiv).115 For Spence, P’u was credible as a “recorder of Shantung [province] memories; as a teller of tales; and as a molder of images, some-times of astonishing grace and power” (xv). On the surface, this might look like Spence is simply going to use P’u’s fictional and other creative works as particular
“historical artifacts” and evidence, as we have discussed—but I think we will find that there is much more than this at work. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) wrote (and not a few of his peers agreed) that fiction writers had commandeered much of what it was important for historians to do: “to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood,…to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes” (qtd. in Lowenthal 225). Though we must always pro-ceed gingerly in light of these ideas, with fiction playing a role in history and reveal-ing more, that many historical writers and analysts feel similarly has I think been shown in other parts of this work. We find, in short, that this confabulation, this merg-ing of genre and outlook will enable, in the grandest sense, a “mappmerg-ing [of] the limit between the imaginary and the real which begins with the invention of fiction itself”
(White The Content of the Form 45). David Lowenthal may bring some of this theo-rizing down to earth when he writes how, beginning in the 19th century, “the novelist deliberately invented was held a virtue; his past was more vital than the historian’s because it was partly self-created” (Lowenthal 226, emphasis in original). He goes on to relate how the historian Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) valued historical novels because they let readers “feel the past as formal history could not” (Lowenthal 226, emphasis in original), and they contained the necessary contingency of historical
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perience, putting “readers in the past like people of the time, who could not know what was coming next” (Lowenthal 226). In the end, and into the 20th century, Lowenthal acknowledges that “Each genre has encroached on the domain once exclu-sive to the other; history has grown more like fiction, fiction more like history” (227), and even further, “Fiction criticizes history while cannibalizing it; history derogates fiction’s claims while adopting fictional insights and techniques” (Lowenthal 228).
Views like these set the stage for all of my analysis in this chapter.
Burge oni ng Mat ric es o f Fic tionali ze d Hist o ry
THE ABOVE DISCUSSION indicates that varied discourses and dialogs may en-ter into our environment of historical narrative and consciousness. Such an idea seems straightforward enough in a Rortyan sense. Simply put, the fictionalized histories that I have kept in mind throughout this study play an important role in examining diver-gent emotions, preferences, beliefs, intuitions, biases, philosophies and identities, evincing newly told histories that function as foils to non-fiction historiography, pro-viding credible and necessary perspectives, attitudes, enlargements, sensibilities and dispensations to complete historical apprehension. Hayden White has said that histo-rians say “‘let’s get the true story.’ But there is no one true story!” (“The Aim of In-terpretation” 74). We saw above that White comments on how we “want loose ends,”
and the entire quote about the value of multiple points of view examining the traces of the past runs:
Then the more events you have, the better, because this reality is highly complex. You can’t tell a simple story about it. You want loose ends. You want to create an archive, as it were, that will admit of a wide variety of