What is at issue is not the interpretation of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself. (..) The principal difference between the pan-textualist sense of history and what I take to be the pluralist sense of it - as represented by, say, Wayne Booth and M. H. Abrams - has to do with the relationship presumed to exist between the field of past occurrences and any representation of that field. (..) For the pan-textualist, any representation of history has to be considered a construction of language, thought, and imagination rather than a report of a structure of meaning presumed to exist in historical events themselves. (..) For both Abrams and Booth there is a single truth to be revealed, because in history things happened as they did and not otherwise. But for Abrams the most one can hope for is a perspective that will reveal a part of this truth, while for Booth a perspective is not enough. (..) historical pluralism presupposes either a number of equally plausible accounts of the historical past or, alternatively, a number of different but equally meaningful constructions of that indeterminate field of past occurrences (..) Pan-textualists do differ is in their conviction that history cannot be appealed to as a neutral arbitrator of the conflicting claims of ancients and moderns over how the texts that comprise the canons of a tradition are to be read, interpreted, assessed, and used. (..) story-conception of historical representation s a preconception shared by Booth and Abrams alike, on the basis of which they are able to elaborate their differing notions of the possibilities of ever telling the definitive story (..) Ricoeur's argument (as presented in his recent Temps et recit) that historical accounts cast in the form of a narrative may be as various as the modes ofemplotment which literary critics have identified as constituting the different principles for structuring narratives in general. (..) mutually exclusive narrative interpretations, e.g. certain sets of historical events are intrinsically tragic, or comic, or epic, or farcical in nature > one mode of emplotment for the truthful representation of their real meaning. But real events are tragic or comic or epic or farcical only when viewed from the perspective of the interests of specific agents or groups involved in them. (..) Tragic, comic, epic, and farcical are not descriptive but interpretive categories. (..) Neither the reality nor the meaning of history is "out there" in the form of a story awaiting only a historian to discern its outline and identify the plot that comprises its meaning. (..) the plausibility of any given narrative account of real events resides in the perceived adequacy of a given plot structure to the representation of the meaning of the set of events serving as the historian's referent. (..) the number of strategies available to the historian for endowing events with meaning will be coterminous with the number of generic story types available in the historian's own culture. (..) Narrative accounts of real historical events, then, admit of as many equally plausible versions in their representation as there are plot structures available in a given culture for endowing stories, whether fictional or real, with meanings. (..) problem of setting limits on the number of kinds of stories that one can plausibly tell about a given set of historical events (..) The association of historical rep- resentations with narrative modes of discourse is a very old convention, but it is only a convention nonetheless. (..) One cannot check the fall into "radical relativism" to which pluralism in general is prone by appeal to "a sense of history," as if this were an unproblematic concept not threatened by theR same "relativism" which critical pluralism wishes to avoid. (..) classic historicism: the principles of interpretation used in the analysis of any past epoch had to be drawn from the epoch in question. Crisis of historicism: realization that what constituted the dominant mode of consciousness of an age was the problem of historical reconstruction, not a solution thereof. (..) the choices confronting the historian are monism, on the one side, and radical relativism, on the other. (..) Stories are not true or false, but rather more or less intelligible, coherent, consistent, persuasive, and so on. And this is true of historical, no less than of fictional, stories. (..) Booth apparently believes that one can set a limit on critical relativism by appeal to a historical reality that possesses a structure such that it can be truthfully represented in a story rather than simply be rendered intelligible by representing it as a story of a specific kind. This is a common error of historians who regard storytelling as the "natural" way of representing historical events, processes, and situations. If one adopts this point of view, then the choice between monism and radical relativism becomes unimportant. (..) A narrative account of anything will be both monistic insofar as it is a single story and relativistic insofar as it is told from a single point of view. (..) For those who deny the adequacy of narrative historiography to the representation of real events, the issue of pluralism does not arise. For contemporary non- or anti-narrativist historians, historical accounts are either true or false, intelligible or unintelligible. (..) The whole question of pluralism, in both criticism and historiography, is linked in some crucial way to a narrativistic notion of historical representation. |