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

[neilgodfrey]

Nothing wrong with details [which DCH feels swamped by]. It is in fact the sorts of arguments of the Schaeffers et al that led to Cohn's book and she uses the details to demolish their two-dimensional readings of the texts. The postmodernist elision of author and narrator, of fiction and nonfiction, is all very two dimensional, often with the very examples they use to prove their points in fact doing the very opposite.

But discussion cannot happen without addressing the details. I mentioned some of them in the original post. They really do go to the heart of the question. If we don't take up the details and fall back on postmodernism then the question you raise is merely rhetorical and the thread deserves to run out before it starts.

Similarly with discussions of history writing. The Whites and co really cannot genuinely blur the distinctions as many say they do -- enough historians have addressed the postmodernist view of history with details (all under the same criteria as Cohn covers -- referentiality, voice and mode, narrator/author.)

Well, all I can say is that your way of describing the positions of some postmodernists as "two dimensional" and somehow blurring the distinction between author and narrator, is that I do not remember ever seeing anything like what you describe Cohen as saying as adopted positions of any critical school described by Alun Munslow in Deconstructing History, 2nd revised edition 2006, 1997). That they somehow intentionally blur the author-narrator distinction may be charged by some, but it does not match adopted positions, IIRC.

Funny thing is, the narratology related web article I previously provided a link to, and which is very much postmodern, cites Cohn several times, approvingly, for Cohn's descriptions of the positions adopted by the various parties involved in the debate.

Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Fictional vs. Factual Narration in The Living Handbook of Narratology website:
http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/ind ... _Narration

That tells me that if a postmodern-right author (that's just the territory where the narratologists I had heard about in Munslow's book seem to lurk) can cite Cohn approvingly, then I cannot think that her criticisms of the postmodern POV could have been as crushingly painful as you suggest - unless they were directed at specific critics within the postmodern community, which is very wide and ranges from the most secular critics to religious-right types. They are not all the same.

Alun Munslow provides a general introduction to the approaches to history adopted by all sorts of modernists and postmodernists. The title "Deconstructing History" is a nod towards the Deconstructionist school of historians, in the sense that "If you deconstructionists can dish it out when evaluating the work of their peers, how about me deconstruction you as historians?" He is very neutral, I think, towards those he describes, so one's "spider sense" will not go off all the time, making the read a drag. But there is a LOT of technical language, although I believe he provided a dictionary at the end.

Stephen Moore, for his part, described one of the dangers he discovered in the narrative based school. For a time Moore, a Christian of what we usually call the moderate-liberal range of the religious spectrum, found the "new literary criticism" of the New testament (mainly Narrative Criticism coupled with Reader-Response Criticism) to be a way out of the dissonance he felt after his adoption of Historical Criticism some years beforehand. "Soon, however, a sneaking suspicion began to creep up on me ...: What if narrative criticism were actually a retreat from the critical rigor of historical scholarship? What if its not inconsiderable success were due to a widespread weariness with 'the unrest and difficulty for Christian piety' caused by centuries of historical criticism?" (Moore, Post Structuralism and the New Testament, 1994, p.115, and yes, I admit to being old and dusty).

Let me slowly, but somewhat surely, see what I can do to learn more about Cohn's POV about the subject of author-narrator divide. Somehow I think this is getting mixed up with the true vs. real issue in distinguishing historians from authors of fiction ("true" = what actually happened, and "real" = a writer's intuitive perception of something - anything really - in this case committed to writing as fiction). Maybe it's related, I don't know ...

DCH

I think we may be facing off each other with some uncertainty about where each is coming from, perhaps? -- I certainly noticed the articles citations of Cohn but did not see (rightly or wrongly) how its discussion related to the particular point of this thread, and I myself have no problem with certain positions that are bracketed with postmodernism -- though with qualifications. White, for example, did not go nearly so far in his work on novelistic themes in history writing as many postmodern historians have run with his start.

When I say "two-dimensional" I am thinking of analyses that seem to simply gloss over so many factors that contribute towards how we understand texts. Again, details need to be addressed to clarify.

On my blog someone has protested against my stance on postmodernism by claiming that there are certain works that blur the line between fiction and nonfiction. But in each case we can analyse what is fictional and what is nonfiction in those works, so they are not some third genre or entity, but simply a playful, creative mix of the two -- something authors have always had fun doing. I'm not sure if that point relates to what is on your mind here, though.

[Ulan]

So how would we classify a text like the "Book of Mormon"? It certainly claims to tell history, like the settling of the Americas by the lost tribes of the Jews. Most Mormons treat the narrative as history. Most other people will probably classify the work as fiction. Would the latter be wrong?

I'm less interested regarding the "history" part of the question, as this has been dealt with in detail here: History Through Seer Stones: Mormon Historical Thought 1890-2010. My question is rather regarding the "fiction" part.

[neilgodfrey]

So how would we classify a text like the "Book of Mormon"? It certainly claims to tell history, like the settling of the Americas by the lost tribes of the Jews. Most Mormons treat the narrative as history. Most other people will probably classify the work as fiction. Would the latter be wrong?

I'm less interested regarding the "history" part of the question, as this has been dealt with in detail here: History Through Seer Stones: Mormon Historical Thought 1890-2010. My question is rather regarding the "fiction" part.

I see nothing wrong with classifying the Book of Mormon with religious texts -- which are distinct from both novels (fiction) and historical works (nonfiction). If we take "fiction" in its broadest sense -- as opposed to nonfiction -- then the Book of Mormon is fiction.

Fictional texts, religious or otherwise, can employ all sorts of genres, the historical or biographical genre included, without losing their fictional status. We have several, probably many, instances where readers have been fooled by a well crafted fiction (novel) into believing it was either non-fiction or based on non-fiction.

Look at the contemporary historian Tom Holland. He writes nonfiction (researched historical works) but will at times slip into what can best be described as a novelistic genre -- as when he is imaginatively drawing readers into a battle scene. He will describe the flaring of the horses' nostrils, the thundering of their hooves, but he does not slip into fiction.

[Paul the Uncertain]

neilgodfrey

On my blog someone has protested against my stance on postmodernism by claiming that there are certain works that blur the line between fiction and nonfiction.

Moi?

I did argue against the feasibility of any reliable, generally applicable and impersonally valid "history detector" or "fiction detector." And it wasn't so much that Shakespeare's Julius Caesar blurred some line, as that it illustrated that there was no (strictly partitioning) line between the two polar text-types. The play is both history and fiction.

The play isn't academic research history, and it isn't freely imagined fiction. There are hypothetical poles, and there probably are concrete easy-to-classify and "pure" examples (or perhaps exquisitely near-misses in the vicinity) of both poles. The play isn't one of them.

I might have pointed instead to the collective work that is a newspaper or its electronic counterpart. Over there is the weather report, behold the part telling me yesterday's situation. That's probably history. Down below is the daily horoscope. I don't see any grounded fact-claims there are at all; that's probably fiction of some sort.

Then there's a report featuring what Prime Minister May said about how things will go in the upcoming Brexit talks. Future contingency ... warning: that cannot have a current truth-value with certainty! Well, not by natural means. But I think she really did say some of what is attributed to her, and all of the stuff that appears as direct quotation (up to performance failure in transcription). History, I think; I am a trusting soul.

But then there's that last paragraph, where the author tells me, in his own voice, "what she meant." My, but he does make himself at home inside somebody else's skull.

It also doesn't help that I can so easily imagine the Prime Minister reading that paragraph, breaking into a wry smile and muttering, "Excellent ..."

But there's a magic compass that sorts all of that out? That's what I doubt.

[neilgodfrey]

I presume you think otherwise, but I don't see how any of the instances you refer to address the question of the demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. That we can't always immediately know if something is fiction or nonfiction has more to do with presentation or style or such rather than what is itself fiction/nonfiction.

[neilgodfrey]

[The play is both history and fiction.

No, it is a play. It is fiction. That it uses the names of historical persons as its characters and reconstructs events that echo historical events does not make it nonfiction. The playwright creates the characters and the events from his own imagination, using some elements from what he has read in the world of nonfiction along with elements from his personal experiences etc.

It is historical fiction, but it is not history.

[Paul the Uncertain]

neilgodfrey

That we can't always immediately know if something is fiction or nonfiction has more to do with presentation or style or such rather than what is itself fiction/nonfiction.

Probably; it is hard to imagine how we could classify anything by natural means without some finite interval passing between first seeing the example and then labeling it.

Agreed that the interval needn't be the same for all examples. That's the usual thing for "hard problems," that there be some easy problem instances.

... it is a play. It is fiction.

Agreed to both individually as propositions; without comment on whether one implies the other.

No, it is a play. It is fiction.

Disagree. That fiction and history are mutually exclusive is your view, and one of the secondary* issues in dispute.

As for the relevance of this historical drama being a play, 8 the Play by Dustin Lance Black is a theatrical presentation of the final arguments in an American judicial case, purporting to be verifiably consistent with the official transcripts. I acknowledge that I haven't verified this claim. Assuming that the play is described truthfully, as I believe it to be, then how is that play not history, in your view? How is that play fiction?

Or is it not a play?

The playwright creates the characters and the events from his own imagination, ...

Rather like the usual** reader of a history book. Which in turn must be something like the usual reader of primary and secondary sources bearing on the characters and events, which seems like a necessary condition to be the usual author of a "history" in your proposed classification scheme.

Or is it your view that Shakespeare read nothing you would classify as history in preparation for his composition? He just pulled it all out of his head? A lucky guess that the setting was Rome, and a coincidence that the murder weapons were knives?

-----------------------------

* Secondary, since even if we simply assumed the dichotomy, the principal issue between us would remain: whether or not you could actually build your reliable, generally applicable and impersonally valid classifier.

** Usual, meaning neither a subject of the history or the sources, nor a personal witness to the events in question.

[spin]

Are the textual contents of the following fact or fiction?:

1) Feynman's letter to his dead wife
2) Daniel's vision of the kings of the north and south
3) my chocolate fudge recipe
4) Paul's instructions to the Corinthians
5) the lyrics to Yesterday
6) Plato's dialogues
7) Pseudo-Paul's instructions to the Colossians
8) the catholic liturgy
9) Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade"

[Bernard Muller]

Or is it your view that Shakespeare read nothing you would classify as history in preparation for his composition?

My two cents:
In my view, Shakespeare the actor did not have to read "history", because the plays credited to him were most likely written by somebody else.
Shakespeare as a playwright is probably fiction.

On a more serious note, I agree that fiction & history are very often intermixed, finely blended together in many texts, in vastly different ratio. And that's what I see in the gospels, more so in gMark.

Cordially, Bernard

[spin]

Shakespeare as a playwright is probably fiction.

This lacks a Groats-worth of Witte.