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

Historians Cant Speculate - Essay ExampleYet when the historical records of an shell such as American slavery tend to be biased towards the view of it as just another type of economic enterprise, there is unload value in what might be termed memory or the an attempt to explore what actually occurred using the human imagination as a sticker rather than actual historical records. Beloved is a prime example of such an attempt.Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific time-space locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginary 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 between the oeuvre 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 accommodate 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 early 1800s it became conventional, at least among historians, to identify truth with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of the truth (White, p.123) (emphasis added). This might come along almost childishly simplistic to legion(predicate) scholars today, but it can be related to the supposed triumph of the rational, often in the form of Science, over the irrational. The word science means to know (from the Latin scio, to know) and the only thing that can be known is a fact. Fiction was thus a hindrance to the understanding of reality rather than as a way of apprehending it(White, p.123). explanation was thus placed within a hierarchy that placed it indelibly above, and thus superior, to that of mere fiction. Many historians of this era did not seem t o consider the fact that the histories which they were writing depended a lot upon which facts were being considered, and that this just as much 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 ordinal 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 full 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 done 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 send packing cannot be disputed what that falling means can be. Both history and fiction deal with meaning, and thus can be regarded as different techniques with the resembling end in mind.