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History and the Limits of Interpretation A Symposium

History, Fiction, and Human TimeBy

David Carr Philosophy

Emory

Theory should not be constrained or intimidated by common sense. If the scientists ofthe early modern period had not challenged the common-sense basis of Aristotelianphysics and astronomy, the scientific revolution would never have occcured. By now,perhaps because of this shining example, it is considered the mark of intellectualrespectability in many disciplines, especially in the humanities, that common sensedeserves eo ipso to be regarded with skepticism and subjected to challenge. Clearly,however, this otherwise laudable attitude can be carried to extremes whereoverturning common sense, and enjoying the shock that comes with it, can become anend in itself.

Consider the distinction between history and fiction. As literary genres, these areconventionally considered mutually exclusive: history relates events that reallyhappened in the past, fiction portrays imaginary events, that is, things that neverhappened at all. But this distinction has lately been challenged by some literarytheorists and philosophers of history. One can see why the distinction might begin toblur if we look first at works considered fictional. Recently some novelists (E.L.Doctorow in Ragtime is a good example) have taken to attributing fictional activities toreal historical characters. But even in quite traditional fiction the imaginary events ofnovels (and plays and films) are often set in real places and against the background ofreal historical events. Thus many works classified as fiction in fact contain elements ofhistory. This is an uncontroversial observation with which few, including the noveliststhemselves, would disagree.

But it is much more controversial to claim, on the other side, that history unavoidablycontains elements of fiction. With this most historians would not agree. Is this ajustifiable, or an exaggerated, assault on common sense? This is the question I wantto take up in what follows. If true this assertion might lead to the conclusion that thedistinction between history and fiction must be abandoned. I think this would be amistake. After examining this claim about history and fiction and placing it in itsproper context, I want to show that while it is understandable, it rests on a number ofconfusions and is, in the end, untenable.

I. QUESTIONING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION

The view I want to examine is usually associated with French poststructuralism, and istied in with skeptical views about the capacity of language to refer beyond itself to thereal world. But the relevant claims about history and fiction are in fact most fullyexpressed in recent work of Hayden White (who is not French) and Paul Ricoeur (whois not a poststructuralist). Its origins can be traced to certain theorists of the 1960s,and could be said to follow upon the discovery, or rediscovery, that history is indeed aliterary genre.

In an essay on "Historical Discourse"[1] Roland Barthes, one of the fathers ofpoststructuralism, evokes the conventional contrast between fictional and historicalnarrative, and asks: "is there in fact any specific difference between factual andimaginary narrative, any linguistic feature by which we may distinguish on the onehand the mode appropriate to the relation of historical events . . . and on the otherhand the mode appropriate to the epic, novel or drama?" (p. 145) He expresses his

negative conclusion when he says that "by its structures alone, without recourse to itscontent, historical discourse is essentially a product of ideology, or rather ofimagination." (153)

Louis O. Mink, an American theorist of the same period whose work has influencedboth Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, came to similar conclusions. "Narrative form inhistory, as in fiction, is an artifice, the product of individual imagination." As such it"cannot defend its claim to truth by any accepted procedure of argument orauthentication."[2] Hayden White, asking after "The Value of Narrativity in theRepresentation of Reality"[3] comes to the conclusion that its value "arises out of adesire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of animage of life that can only be imaginary" (24).

Paul Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative[4], though he does not try to break down thedistinction between history and fiction, speaks of their "intersection"(entrecroisement) in the sense that each "avails itself" (se sert) of the other. Underthe heading of the "fictionalization of history," he argues that history draws on fictionto "refigure" or "restructure" time by introducing narrative contours into the non-narrative time of nature (III,265). It is the act of imagining (se figurer que. . .) whicheffects the "reinscription of lived time (time with a present) into purely successivetime (time without present)" (III,268) Narrative opens us to the "realm of the 'as if'" (I,101) through the "mediating role of the imaginary" (III,269). This is the fictionalelement in history.

Besides fiction itself, the two other key concepts in these passages are narrative andimagination (or the imaginary). If we are to evaluate these views about the relationbetween history and fiction it will be necessary to examine these concepts and theircombination as they figure in the theories in question. It is clear that they stem insome way from an awareness of what we may call, in the broadest sense, the"literary" aspects of historical discourse.

Before we can appreciate the significance of this, however, we must begin byconsidering the background of these discussions in the philosophy of history. Theseauthors are reacting to a positivistic conception of history that grew up in the 19thcentury and has persisted, in spite of many attacks, well into the 20th. Prior to thelate enlightenment period history was generally conceived as a literary genre morevalued for the moral and practical lessons it could derive from past events than for itsaccuracy in portraying them. Only in the 19th century, first in Germany, did it acquirethe dignity and trappings of an academic discipline or Wissenschaft, complete withcritical methods for evaluating sources and justifying its assertions. The great Leopoldvon Ranke was explicitly repudiating the old topos of historia magistra vitae when heclaimed that the task of history was simply to render the past wie es eigentlichgewesen -- as it really was.[5]

From the time it was firmly established in the academy, history has striven to maintainits respectability as a "scientific" discipline (at least in the German sense ofWissenschaft) and played down the literary features of its discourse. With the rise ofthe so-called social sciences in the 20th century (sociology, anthropolgy, economics,"political science") many historians have coveted a place among them, borrowingquantitative methods and applying them to the past. Here the Annales school inFrance led the way, beginning the the 1930's. Meanwhile, in philosophy, neopositivismin the form of the "unity of science" movement tried to incorporate history by showingthat its mode of explanation is -- or rather could and therefore should be --assimilable to that of the natural sciences.[6]

But this attempt to make history into a science has never been very convincing.History has never in practice achieved the kind of "objectivity" and agreement whichnon-scientists attribute to and envy in the natural sciences. Nor is it completelyassimilable to the social sciences, which themselves, in any case, have never quitelived up to their own scientific pretensions. Three interrelated features of historicaldiscourse have been noted by those who disagree with the attempt to integratehistory with the sciences: first, history is concerned with individual events and coursesof events for their own sake, not in order to derive general laws from them (it is"ideographic" rather than "nomothetic"); second, to account for historical events isoften to understand the subjective thoughts, feelings and intentions of the personsinvolved rather than to relate external events to their external causes("understanding" versus "explanation"); and third, to relate sequences of events inthis way, with reference to the intentions of the persons involved, is to place them innarrative form, i.e., to tell stories about them.

For the positivists it is precisely these features which history should suppress or

overcome if it is to become genuinely scientific. And to some degree the Annaleshistorians and their followers have tried to meet this demand: by shifting their focusfrom persons and their actions to deep-structure economic forces and long-term socialchanges they produce a discourse which seems far removed from traditional history.But narrative history has never disappeared, and those who counter the positivist viewclaim that if social and economic history can dispense with traditional story-tellingthey still need to be complemented by narrative accounts of conscious agents. Againstthe demand that history be assimilated to the social or even the natural sciences,many have argued that the narrative discourse of history is a cognitive form in its ownright and a mode of explanation perfectly appropriate to our understanding of thehuman past. Indeed, beginning with Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians at the end of thelast century, a strong countercurrent to positivism has refused to accept naturalscience as the model for disciplines dealing with human events and actions, includingeven the social sciences, and has insisted on the autonomy and respectbility in its ownright of knowledge based on an understanding of conscious human agents whichpresents its results in narrative form.

How do Barthes, Mink, White and Ricoeur fit into this picture? They arrive on thescene when the narrative form in general, and its role in history in particular, are beingintensively discussed. It is this feature of history which is the primary focus of theirattention, and White and Ricoeur, at least, believe that history is always essentiallynarrative even when it tries to divest itself of its story-telling features.[7] At the sametime they still think of history as asserting its capacity to "represent" the past "as itreally was," i.e. as claiming "scientific" status for its results. Their view is that thislatter claim cannot be upheld in view of the narrative character of historical discourse.Why?

The passages quoted above indicate that for these writers, narrative, as the act ofstory-telling, is not appropriate to the rendering of real events. A story weavestogether human acts and experiences into a coherent whole with (as Aristotle said) abeginning, a middle and an end. Its criteria are aesthetic, not scientific. It is animaginative act of creation, not the representation of something already given. Thusnarrative is properly at home in fiction, which makes no pretense of portraying thereal world. When narrative is employed in a discipline which purports to depict thereal, it comes under suspicion. If, like history, it deals with a reality which is no longeravailable -- the past -- it is doubly suspect. It is suspected of representing things notas they really happened but as they ought to have happened -- according to what isthought to make a good story.

Worse still, history may be obeying not aesthetic but political or ideological rules. Weall know the uses to which history has been put by authoritarian regimes. In oursociety, even where it still speaks in the traditional narrative voice, history oftenclothes itself in the authority of an academic discipline claiming to tell us the truthabout the past, to be not fiction but fact. But as narrative, acording to these authors,it can no longer uphold this claim. History must, at the very least, be recognized as amixture of fiction and fact. Indeed, it seems that the whole distinction between fictionand non-fiction must be questioned.

II. A RESPONSE

We have outlined the challenge to the distinction between history and fiction. It is timeto respond to it.

The first thing to be noted about this challenge is that it places its advocates, perhapsunwittingly, in league with the positivists. Barthes, Mink, et al., emphasize thosefeatures of historical discourse which differentiate it from scientific explanation, butinstead of defending history as a legitimate cognitive enterprise in its own right, theychallenge its cognitive pretensions. For the positivists, history could become arespectable form of knowledge only if it cast off its "literary" garb and replaced story-telling with causal explanations. For the authors we are examining, too, it is theliterary form of history which seems to prevent it from making claims to knowledge.

Agreeing with the positivists is not necessarily wrong, as if a theory could be provenguilty by association. The fact is, however, that this agreement derives from sometacit assumptions that these theories share -- again, unwittingly -- with the positivists,assumptions which can be shown to be dubious at best. These assumptions concernthe three basic concepts we found combined in the challenge to the distincion betweenhistory and fiction, namely narrative, imagination, and fiction itself. They could also bedescribed as assumptions about reality, about knowledge, and about what fiction is.

The first assumption concerns the alleged contrast between narrative and the reality it

is supposed to depict. Stories portray events which are framed by beginning, middleand end, which exhibit plot-structures, intentions and unintended consequences,reversals of fortune, happy or unhappy endings, and a general coherence in whicheverything has a place. Reality, we are told, is not like that. In the real world thingsjust happen, one after the other, in ways which may seem random to us but are in factstrictly determined by causal laws. Of course such a reality bears no resemblance tonarrative form, and so narrative seems completely inappropriate to it. Story-tellingseems to impose on reality a totally alien form. Conceived in this way, purely in termsof its stucture, narrative seems necessarily to distort reality.

The second tacit assumption of this view, it seems to me, involves a strong oppositionbetween knowledge and imagination. Knowledge is a passive mirroring of reality.Imagination, by contrast, is active and creative, and if imagination gets involved in theprocess of knowing, and actively creates something in the process, then the result canno longer qualify as knowledge.

The third assumption is that there is really no difference between fiction and falsehoodor falsification. What history, and other humanities too, are being accused of doing iswittingly or unwittingly presenting a false rather than a true picture of the world. Thisis what is meant by calling them fictional or claiming that they contain fictionalelements.

I propose now to examine these three assumptions now in reverse order.

1. Fiction and Falsehood

First, the use of the term fiction to mean falsehood creates a conceptual confusionwhich needs to be straightened out before we can decide whether a valid point isbeing made here. Falsehood can occur as the deliberate assertion of untruth -- lying --or simply as error. Fiction, as we usually use that term, is neither, since it makes noclaim to represent reality. Novels, plays and films principally portray persons thatnever existed and actions and events that never occured. What is more, this isunderstood by author and audience alike. What is truly remarkable is that in spite ofthis knowledge we can get emotionally caught up in the lives of ficticious persons. Butno untruth is being told here, at least not in the sense that someone is making amistake, deceiving or being deceived. In a sense, in fiction the question of truth orfalsity simply doesn't arise.

Of course the question of truth in fiction can be raised on other levels: fiction can bemore or less true-to-life, i.e., life-like or plausible. If fiction is true in this sense wemean that it portrays things as they might have been, even though we know (orassume) that they were not so. At a higher level fiction can be truthful in the sensethat it conveys -- perhaps indirectly -- truths about the human condition in general.And if fiction can be true in both of these senses, it can be false as well. But neither ofthese senses of truth and falsity concerns the reality of the persons and eventsportrayed.

Must we not say that fictional statements are literally false?

Some statements in fiction, as already noted, are not. (E.g.,"London is usually foggyin the late fall.") But even an explicitly fictional statement -- e.g. "On a Fridayafternoon in the late fall of 1887 a tall man crossed London bridge, deeply immersedin his own thoughts" -- could, by coincidence, be true. The statement, in that context,would still be fictional. Why? How do we distinguish between fiction and non-fiction?Writing on "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,"[8] John Searle, after comparinga journalist's account with a novel, concludes that "there is no textual property,syntactical or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction." (65) Instead, theidentifying criterion "must of necessity lie in the illocutionary intentions of the author,"that is, in what the author is trying to do by writing this text. These intentions areusually indicated outside the text, e.g. by labeling it "a novel," as opposed, forexample, to a memoir, an autobiography or a history. These terms tell the reader howto take the statements made in the text -- including whether the question of theirtruth should arise or not. Searle's point should be compared with that of RolandBarthes, cited on p.3 above: When he asks whether there is any "linguistic" featuredistinguishing historical from fictional discourse, he is referring to what Searle calls its"syntactic or semantic" properties. Searle agrees with him that there is none. But intypically structuralist fashion, Barthes overlooks those extra-textual features, such asthe author's intentions and the whole conventional setting of the text, which for Searleconstitute the difference.

The criterion for distinguishing fiction from non-fiction is thus not that the former

consists largely of statements that are untrue; rather, it is that these statements areintended by the author not to be true, and not to be taken as true, and are in fact notso taken by the audience as well. If the character in a novel resembles an actualperson, and is even portrayed as doing some things that person did, we might say thenovel was "based on a true story," or even that the resemblance was an amazingcoincidence.

But we wouldn't reclassify it as non-fiction. To take a contrasting case: In a recenthistorical account of the Empress Hsu Tsi of China,[9] the author describes previousaccounts of his subject as getting things so wrong, even to the point of attributing tothe Empress the actions of another person altogether, that we would have to concludethat there was no one person at all who did the things described. Would we then moveit to the fiction section of the library? Of course not: it remains history even if it isextremely bad history.

When the claim is made that history contains fiction, or elements of fiction, or morebroadly that it calls into quesiton the boundary between history and fiction, surely thisdoes not mean that historians are making statements they and their audience know tobe about things that never happened, or whose truth or falsity are not important.Historians certainly intend and claim to speak of real persons and events and to tell ustrue things about them. If the first assumption is even to make sense, the point mustbe that, knowingly or unknowingly, historians are doing something like what fictionwriters do -- imagining things as they might have been, perhaps, rather thanrepresenting them as they were -- and that because of this the truth of what they sayis somehow questionable. The claim is not just that their results are untrue --something that would have to be shown in each case -- but that they must be untrueor that their truth or falsity is in principle undecidable, apparently because of whateverthe historian shares with the novelist.

2. Knowledge and Imagination

And what is that? Presumably the capacity to imagine. Thus if our interpretation of thefirst assumption is correct, it makes sense only if the second assumption is true. Thecapacity to imagine is opposed to knowledge as if they were mutually exclusive.Knowledge as "representation" is thought to be the passive reflection of the real,simply registering or reporting what is there. But this is a naive and simplisticconception of knowledge which ignores some of the best insights of modernphilosophy. Since Kant we have recognized that knowledge is anything but passive, itsresult not merely a copy of external reality. Rather, it is an activity which calls intoplay many "faculties," including sense, judgment, reason, and, very importantly, thecapacity to conceive of things being other than they actually are. It may be thoughtthat anything that is the object of the imagination must be imaginary in the sense ofnon-existent. But this is only part of what we mean by imagination. In the broadestsense, imagination is best described as the capacity to envision what is not diectlypresent to the senses. In this sense we can imagine things that were, or will be, orexist elsewhere, as well as things that don't exist at all.[10]

Is fiction a product of the imagination? It certainly is. But so, it could be said, isphysics; and so is history -- though none of these is a product of the imagination only.If the historian draws on the imagination, it is in order to speak about how thingswere, not to conjure up something imaginary. The difference between knowledge andfiction is not that the one uses imagination and the other doesn't. It is rather that inone case imagination, in combination with other capacities, is marshalled in theservice of producing assertions, theories, predictions, and in some cases narratives,about how the world really is, or will be, or was; and in the other case it is used toproduce stories about characters, events, actions and even worlds that never were.

Thus the second assumption, like the first, dissolves upon closer examination.Historians use their imagination -- along with other capacities, of course, like sense,judgment and reason -- not to produce fiction but to make claims about the real world-- in particular, to produce narrative accounts of how things really happened. So whatis it about these accounts that renders them "fictional," in the sense of untrue, i.e.that prevents them from counting as genuine knowledge? This brings us to the thirdassumption, which is that narrative can never give is an acount of how things reallyhappened, because "the way things really happen" is utterly at odds with the narrativeform.

3. Narrative and Reality

This view seems to me an expression of the one of the deepest assumptions ourauthors share with the positivists. This is the idea that in order to qualify as real the

world must be utterly devoid of those intentional, meaningful and narrative featureswe attribute to it when we tell stories about it. Reality must be a meaninglesssequence of external events, and time must be nothing but a series of nows, andanything else we attribute to it is at best mere fantasy or or wishful thinking, at worstimposition or distortion. What is somehow forgotten is that history is not about thephysical but about the human world. That is, it is principally about persons -- andgroups of persons -- and about their actions. But if these are to be understood theymust be related to the intentions, hopes, fears, expectations, plans, successes andfailures of those who act.

It can be argued (and I have argued at length elsewhere[11]) that the human worldmanifests a concrete version of the narrative form in the very structure of action itself.The means-end structure of action is a protoytpe of the beginning-middle-endstructure of narrative, and it can be said that human beings live their lives byformulating and acting out stories that they implicitly tell both to themselves and toothers. Indeed, in this realm time itself is human, narratively shaped by beings wholive their lives, not from moment to moment, but by remembering what was andprojecting what will be. Although it is assuredly embedded in the physical world and isdatable, human time is not that of the numbered sequence (t1, t2, etc.) or even thetime of before and after, earlier and later, but the time of past and future asexperienced from the vantage point of the present by conscious, intentional agents.

If this is so then the narrative form inheres not only in the telling of history but also inwhat is told about. Those who argue against this view often point out that life is oftenmessy and disorganized, that it does not have the "coherence, integrity, fullness andclosure" (Hayden White) of fictional stories: things go wrong, randomness intrudes,actions have unintended consequences, etc. But they overlook two things: one is thatthis is the very reality the best fictional stories are about; only the worst detectivestories and Harlequin romances have the kind of boringly predictable "closure" Whitehas in mind. Second, life can be messy and disorganized because we live it accordingto plans, projects and "stories" that often go wrong -- that is, because it has, overall,the narrative and temporal structure I have tried to describe.

But the real opposition to the view I have outlined stems, I believe, from the beliefthat the only true "reality" is physical reality. This is, as I have said, the basis ofpositivist metaphysics, but it is also one of the deeply rooted prejudices of our age.Somehow the world of physical objects in space and time, the world of what isexternally observable, describable and explainable in terms of mechanical pushes andpulls, and predictable by means of general laws, counts as reality in the primarysense. Everything else -- human experience, social relations, cultural and aestheticentities -- is secondary, epiphenomenal, and "merely subjective;" and the only trueexplanation of it is going to trace it back to the physical world.

Now there may be a good metaphysical argument for the primacy of physical realityand even for the primacy of physical explanation -- though I have never seen either.But such arguments would not be relevant to the point I am trying to make. Asconscious human beings acting in the world, the intentions, meanings, culturalstructures and values, not only of ourselves but also of others, are as real as anythingwe know. They are real in a sense that can never be touched by metaphyscialspeculations: that is, they matter. Even the physical world enters into this picture, butnot as a merely objective realm. It is the constant background and theater ofoperations for human actions, and it comes laden with economic, cultural andaesthetic value for the persons and communities that live in it. This is nature not "initself," but nature as experienced, inhabited, cultivated, explored and exploited byhuman beings and societies.

Whether it is real or unreal, more real or less real in some abstract metaphysicalsense, it is this humanly real world that history, and other forms of truth-telling ornon-fictional narrative, like biography and autobiography, are about. Narrative isappropriate to it because the structures of narrative are already inherent in humanreality. The historian does not have to "reinscribe" lived time into natural time by theact of narration, as Ricoeur says; lived time is already there before the historiancomes along. To tell stories about the human past is not to impose an alien structureon it but is continuous with the the very activity that makes up the human past.

This is not to say that every historical narrative is true, or that some narratives arenot better than others. It is simply to deny that narratives are incapable of being truejust because they are narratives. Likewise, when we spoke of the role of imagination,we were not claiming that every use of the imagination in history is legitimate; onlythat not everything produced by the imagination need be merely imaginary. I do notintend to get into the question of how we evaluate narrative accounts in history and

how we distinguish the better from the worse. Suffice it to say that it may involvemore than just checking sources.

III. AN EXAMPLE

It may be helpful at this point to test some of the things we have been saying byconsidering an example of historical discourse. I choose quite deliberately a passagethat some historians may regard as an extreme case. In his recently publishedLandscape and Memory, Simon Schama describes Sir Walter Ralegh planning hisGuianna expedition in Durham House, London:

From his lofty vantage point on the north bank, where the Thames made a snaking,southern bend, Ralegh could survey the progress of empire: the dipping oars of thequeen's state barge as it made its way from Greenwich to Sheen; bunched masts ofpinnaces and carracks swaying at their berths; broad-sterned Dutch fly boatsbouncing on the dock-tide; wherries taking passengers to the Southwark theaters; thewhole humming business of the black river. But through the miry soup of refuse thatslapped at his walls, Ralegh could see the waters of the Orinoco, as seductivelynacreous as the pearl he wore on his ear.[12]

There are several things we must note about this passage: the first is that it isobviously not fictional in any conventional sense of the word. It is presented as part ofa historical account which is clearly marked as such in all the conventional ways. Whatthis indicates to us is that the author intends in this particular passage to portraysomething that really happened, not some imaginary scene.

Second, there are core features of this passage that can obviously be backed up byhistorical evidence: Ralegh's presence in Durham House during the planning of hisexpedition; the view of the Thames available from that place; the boats that could beseen on the Thames at that time, together with their descriptions; even the pearl inRalegh's ear. (I have no idea whether there actually is evidence for any of thesethings, or for that matter against them; it is just that they are susceptible ofconfirmation by reference to sources.)

Third, the imagination of the author is clearly at work here, not in producing animaginary scene, but in bringing together these various elements to portray somethingreal. Schama doesn't even say Ralegh did but only that he could survey the "wholehumming business of the black river" visible from his vantage point. Of course, as asailor Ralegh would hardly have overlooked it. Schama goes further, though, when hesays that what Ralegh could see in this busy scene was "the progress of empire." Atthe very least this tells us that the actual scene did symbolize the progress of empire,whether Ralegh saw it that way or not.

Of course, Schama is suggesting that he did see it that way; and further, in the climaxof the passage, that Ralegh not only could but did see, "through the miry soup" of theThames before him, the waters of the Orinoco. What has Schama done here? He hasdescribed Ralegh's view of things, his state of mind, as it may have been during aparticular time. Earlier we described "true to life" fiction as portraying events as theymight have been. Is Schama not doing something close to that? Perhaps, but againSchama's intention as a historian is to portray the real; and what is more, the wholepassage coud be seen as building a case for saying Ralegh actually did see things thisway. It is not a conclusive case, needless to say, but it does give us reasons foraccepting Schama's descriptions as veridical. It provides a form of evidence, if you will-- different from reference to sources, but evidence still -- for believing his account.

Of course, the persuasiveness of this passage has another source, and that is thelarger narrative of which it is a part. The passage itself describes only Ralegh's activityat Durham House. But what he is doing there is planning an expedition, so it isunderstandable that his thoughts should be on his goal. Here Ralegh is presented as ahuman being in the human world. His physical surroundings are not just impinging onhim causally; they have significance for him, a significance which is derived from theirrelation to a long-term project in which he is engaged. In this sense they areembedded in a story which Ralegh is projecting before himself and which he willproceed to act out. This is the primary narrative which shapes the human time ofRalegh's own past, present and future. It is this first-order narrative that Schama'ssecond-order narrative is about.

IV. CONCLUSION

I hope the foregoing reflections support the conclusion that the distinction betweenfiction and history, in its commonsense form, is a valid one and must be maintained. I

have tried to show that current attempts to fudge this distinction rest on a number ofconfusions and untenable tacit assumptions concerning the nature of fiction, the roleof imagination in knowledge, and the relation between narrative and historical reality.These confusions and assumptions derive, we have seen, from a consideration of the"literary" character of historical discourse and from certain dubious metaphysicaldoctrines, ultimately derived from or shared with positivism, about the nature ofreality.

Of course history is a literary genre, and as such it shares many features with fiction,notably the narrative form. Furthermore, like writers of fiction, historians use theirimagination. But it does not follow from this that history merges with fiction or thatthese elements eo ipso introduce falsehood into historical knowledge or make itimpossible to distinguish the true from the false. Historians avail themselves of theseelements precisely in order to tell the truth about human events in the past. Whetherthey actually succeed in doing so in any particular case is another matter, to bedecided by appeal to evidence, to considerations of coherence, to psychological insightor theory, and many other things. But their capacity for success cannot be ruled outsimply on the grounds that their inquiry makes use of imagination and narrative form.Far from standing in the way of historical truth, these are appropriate means forachieving it. The reason for this, I have tried to argue here, is that they derive fromthe very structure of historical reality and from the nature of human time.

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