History as Fiction Designed to Unite Us by Jeff Riggenbach

[Stephane Budge]

Today, history is regarded, if not as one of the social sciences, then
at least as an independent discipline that deals in facts, not
fancies; in edification, not entertainment. But it was not always
thus. Harry Elmer Barnes reports that before the 18th century, "there
had been either no attempt to cite sources or else the citations had
been hopelessly confused; there had been no general practice of
establishing the genuineness of a text; there had been little
hesitancy in altering the text of a document to improve the style."[1]
And even after the 18th century itself had begun to fade into history,
the new standards Barnes describes had still not really become
universal. On the contrary: "Prior to the French Revolution," Hayden
White writes, historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary
art. … The eighteenth century abounds in works which distinguish
between the study of history on the one side and the writing of
history on the other. The writing was a literary, specifically
rhetorical exercise, and the product of this exercise was to be
assessed as much on literary as on scientific principles."[2]

In point of fact, until late in the 19th century, most historians
regarded themselves neither as social scientists (a concept that did
not even exist before the 19th century) nor as humanistic scholars,
but rather as literary men, men of letters. The stories they were
telling were true, of course, but nonetheless they were telling
stories, just as though they were novelists, and their job, as they
saw it, was to tell their stories as vividly and poetically as any
novelist. Peter Novick reports that George Bancroft, William Lothrop
Motley, William H. Prescott, and Francis Parkman … each, in at least
one of their major works,employed the organization of the stage play,
with a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue. Sir Walter Scott was, by
a wide margin, the most popular and imitated author in the early-
nineteenth-century United States, and the florid style of the
"literary" historians gave clear evidence of his influence.[3]

And not only did the most representative 19th-century historians think
of themselves as litterateurs, most of them saw themselves in
particular as the providers of an important kind of inspirational
literature. As Novick puts it, [t]he "gentleman amateurs" wrote not to
keep the pot boiling, or out of professional obligation to colleagues,
but because they had an urgent message to deliver to the general
reading public. "If ten people in the world hate despotism a little
more and love civil and religious liberty a little better in
consequence of what I have written, I shall be satisfied," Motley
wrote.[4]

More specifically, most of the 19th-century American historians were
convinced that, as Peter Charles Hoffer writes, by celebrating our
history we might heal our political differences. Look to the Founders,
these historical boosters argued; praise, exalt,and honor them. Ignore
their faults and failings, for the message must be an uplifting one to
which everyone can subscribe. The greatest of the Founders, George
Washington, became at the hands of the itinerant bookseller and
preacher Mason Weems an unblemished paragon of virtue, whose "great
talents, constantly guided and guarded by religion he put at the
service of his country."[5]

Of course, in order to transform George Washington into "an
unblemished paragon of virtue," Weems had to exercise a bit of
literary license,even making up one of his most famous anecdotes —
that of the young Washington and the cherry tree — out of whole cloth.
'Parson Weems'Fable' by Grant WoodBut Weems was far from alone in
employing such techniques. As Hoffer puts it, "Against the vast profit
perceived in this approach, what reader could object to the
historians' rearrangement of their subjects' language, or to their
selective use of facts?" Hoffer calls attention to "an 1835 edition of
Washington's letters, edited by Reverend Jared Sparks,"in which the
editor "regularly altered Washington's words" and "sometimes pasted
one piece of a document into another document entirely."Yet, so far as
readers and other historians were concerned, "[i]t did not seem to
matter …. After all, the entire purpose of editing the letters was
moral instruction, and ministers like Sparks long had the tradition of
cutting and pasting Scripture in their sermons." [6]

Hoffer also suggests that we take a close look at George Bancroft's
"monumental ten-volume History of the United States, the last volume
of which appeared in 1874. Bancroft's History was to become the
standard work on American history for generations. … When he died in
1891, he was the most honored of our historians, and his works were
widely read." Bancroft "believed that his job was to write a chronicle
that would make his readers proud of their country's history," Hoffer
tells us,[a]nd when it suited his didactic purposes, he fabricated. He
"felt free [as Bancroft himself explained in the preface to his great
work] to change tenses or moods, to transpose parts of quotations, to
simplify language, and to give free renditions." If the purpose of
history was to tell stories that taught lessons, such "blending" could
hardly be objectionable, and for contemporary reviewers, it was not.
[7]

Hoffer notes that Bancroft was also sloppy about crediting his
sources. For example, he "made no real distinction between primary
sources and secondary sources. When a secondary source cited a passage
from a primary source, Bancroft felt perfectly free to reuse the
language of the secondary source in his own account without
identifying it as such. He cited the secondary-source pages, but
copied or closely paraphrased rather than quoted." After all, a work
of history was a work of literature, was it not? All that really
mattered was whether the passage in question fit into the flow of the
style, whether it fit artistically into the work — not whether it was
accompanied by some sort of footnote!

It was the tail end of the 19th century before the calling of the
historian had been professionalized and academicized to such an extent
that a majority of practitioners in the field had come to hold the
view of their discipline that we now take for granted — the historian
as dispassionate seeker after truth, a scholar, much more like an
anthropologist or sociologist than a novelist or playwright. Still,
there were holdouts. The long tradition of historical works written by
novelists and poets and offered frankly, not as scholarship but as
lovely letters, died particularly hard. In the 1890s, just as the new
social-scientist paradigm was at last coming to dominate the
historical profession, Edgar Saltus, a then very popular and
successful writer who is now utterly forgotten, was putting the
finishing touches on his best known and most frequently reprinted
book, Imperial Purple (1892), a specimen of what Claire Sprague calls
"a genre almost non-existent today — history decked in the colorful
impressionism of the magazine essay of the last [19th] century."[8]
Before his death in 1921, Saltus would also do for Russia's Romanov
dynasty what he had done for the Caesars of imperial Rome in Imperial
Purple. The Imperial Orgy was brought out by Boni and Liveright in
1920.

A few years later, the renowned poet Carl Sandburg would begin
publishing an even more ambitious work, though one quite as free of
footnotes or bibliography as Saltus's works had been — a six-volume
biography of Abraham Lincoln. "The two volumes of The Prairie Years
were the publishing event of 1926," reports James Hurt, "and the four
volumes of The War Years were an equal success in 1939." [9] As late
as 1969, Richard Cobb, whom John Tosh describes as "a leading
historian of the French Revolution," could write of the historian that
"His principal aim is to make the dead live. And, like the American
'mortician,'he may allow himself a few artifices of the trade: a touch
of rouge here, a pencil-stroke there, a little cotton wool in the
cheeks, to make the operation more convincing."[10] Only five years
later, in 1974, the late Shelby Foote, who made his early reputation
as a novelist, published the last volume of what The New York Times
called his "2,934-page, three-volume, 1.5 million-word military
history, The Civil War: A Narrative," a work characterized by
"punctilious, but defiantly unfootnoted research." It was immensely
popular, earning "considerably more in royalties than any of his
novels had earned," and winning him an invitation to serve as a
consultant and onscreen expert for the "smash hit" Ken Burns
documentary on the war, a job that made Foote into "a prime-time
star."[11]

It is difficult indeed to ignore the many similarities between the
historian's task and that of the novelist. As Hayden White writes,
"[v] iewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are
indistinguishable from one another." Moreover,the aim of the writer of
a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish
to provide a verbal image of "reality." The novelist may present his
notion of this reality indirectly, that is to say, by figurative
techniques, rather than directly, which is to say, by registering a
series of propositions which are supposed to correspond point by point
to some extra-textual domain of occurrence or happening, as the
historian claims to do. But the image of reality which the novelist
thus constructs is meant to correspond in its general outline to some
domain of human experience which is no less "real" than that referred
to by the historian.[12]

To achieve this common end of "providing a verbal image of 'reality,'"
both historians and novelists tell stories. "The late R. G.
Collingwood insisted," White reminds us, that the historian was above
all a story teller and suggested that historical sensibility was
manifested in the capacity to make a plausible story out of a
congeries of "facts" which, in their unprocessed form, made no sense
at all. In their efforts to make sense of the historical record, which
is fragmentary and always incomplete, historians have to make use of
what Collingwood called "the constructive imagination," which told the
historian — as it tells the competent detective — what "must have been
the case" given the available evidence ….

"Collingwood suggested," according to White, "that historians come to
their evidence endowed with a sense of the possible forms that
different kinds of recognizably human situations can take. He called
this sense the nose for the 'story' contained in the evidence or for
the 'true' story that was buried in or hidden behind the 'apparent'
story."[13] Journalists, those historians in a hurry who provide what
legendary Washington Post publisher Phillip Graham famously called the
"first rough draft of … history" (and whose rough draft not
infrequently becomes the final draft), make a very similar
distinction. You either have a "nose for news," they say — good "news
sense," good "news judgment" — or you don't. If you do, you can see
the story contained in the evidence, the true story buried or hidden
behind the apparent (or, sometimes, the official) story.

The important point here is that describing any historical
event,whether one that took place yesterday or one that took place a
century ago, by telling a story is inescapably an act of imagination.
As White sketches the problem,traditional historiography has featured
predominantly the belief that history itself consists of a congeries
of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal
task of historians is to uncover these stories and to retell them in a
narrative, the truth of which would reside in the correspondence of
the story told to the story lived by real people in the past.[14]

Yet, "real events do not offer themselves as stories …."[15] In fact,
the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes
of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its
origin in wishes, daydreams, reveries. Does the world really represent
itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central
subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that
permits us to see "the end" in every beginning? Or does it present
itself … either as mere sequence without beginning or end or as
sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude?[16]

In short, "stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real
story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion
of a true story,this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All
stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can be true
only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of
speech can be true."[17]

A metaphor is a lie that conveys truth — or, at any rate, what the
maker of the metaphor regards as truth. "Men are pigs." "The world is
a ghetto." "The years are gusts of wind, and we are the leaves they
carry away."[18] Taken literally, all these statements are untrue.
They are falsehoods, lies. Taken figuratively, however, each of them
conveys an arguable truth about its subject. A novel — a long,
elaborate lie, involving the events in the lives of wholly imaginary
human beings — is a metaphor for human life in the world as we know
it. In this sense,every work of fiction is philosophical, because
every work of fiction conveys an at least implicit statement about or
judgment upon the human condition.

This does not mean that every fiction writer is also a philosopher or
even philosophical by temperament. Consider, in regard to this issue,
the testimony of three fiction writers who are also, in some sense,
philosophers: Jean Paul Sartre, William H. Gass, and Ayn Rand.[19]
According to Gass, "fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure
philosophy," and "the novelist and the philosopher are companions in a
common enterprise, though they go about it in different ways."[20]
"The esthetic aim of any fiction," he writes, "is the creation of a
verbal world …, often as intricate and rigorous as any mathematic,
often as simple and undemanding as a baby's toy, from whose nature, as
from our own world, a philosophical system may be inferred …."[21]
Moreover, "the world the novelist makes is always a metaphorical model
of our own."[22] Nevertheless, "[t]he philosophy that most writers
embody in their work… is usually taken unconsciously from the
tradition with which the writer is allied." Alternatively, "[h]e may
have represented, in just the confused way it existed, the world his
generation saw and believed they lived in …."[23]

Rand agrees. "The art of any given period or culture," she writes, "is
a faithful mirror of that culture's philosophy." This is so because
"[s]ome sort of philosophical meaning …, some implicit view of life,
is a necessary element of a work of art." Art is "the voice of
philosophy."[24] Indeed, in a sense, art is the language we employ to
express philosophical ideas.

Just as language converts abstractions into the psycho-epistemological
equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units —
so art converts man's metaphysical abstractions into the equivalent of
concretes, into specific entities open to man's direct perception. The
claim that "art is a universal language" is not an empty metaphor, it
is literally true ….

The philosophical ideas that are "in the air," taken for granted,
during the lifetime of a fiction writer need not, cannot, be the only
source of the philosophical ideas that find their way into that
fiction writer's fiction, however. Another source, one drawn upon by
many novelists, is religion, which Rand calls "the primitive form of
philosophy."[25] Still another, drawn upon inescapably by every
fiction writer, is the individual writer's "sense of life."

"A sense of life," Rand wrote in 1966, "is a pre-conceptual equivalent
of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of
man and of existence."

Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as
metaphysics,man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences
emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice
and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world
around him — most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the
world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false;
or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e.,
merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism
sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions,
reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a
habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world
around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or
evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized
feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling
motivational power of a constant, basic emotion — an emotion which is
part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This
is a sense of life.[26]

According to Rand, "[t]he key concept, in the formation of a sense of
life, is the term 'important,'" and it is crucial that we understand,
she says, that "[i]mportant" — in its essential meaning, as
distinguished from its more limited and superficial uses — is a
metaphysical term. It pertains to that aspect of metaphysics which
serves as a bridge between metaphysics and ethics: to a fundamental
view of man's nature. That view involves the answers to such questions
as whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power
of choice or not,whether he can achieve his goals in life or not. The
answers to such questions are "metaphysical value-judgments," since
they form the basis of ethics.

In the end, "[i]t is only those values which he regards or grows to
regard as 'important,' those which represent his implicit view of
reality, that remain in a man's subconscious and form his sense of
life."[27]

And what has all this to do with fiction writing? Everything, for, as
Rand puts it, "[e]sthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of:
what is important?" Another way of saying this is that "[a]n artist …
selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically
significant — and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the
insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence."[28]
Thus, particularly among those fiction writers who are
unphilosophical, but to some extent among all fiction writers, "[i]t
is the artist's sense of life that controls and integrates his work,
directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of
subject to the subtlest details of style."[29] Accordingly, Rand
defines art as "a selective re-creation of reality according to an
artist's metaphysical value-judgments."[30]

Needless to say, then, by publishing a novel, a novelist displays his
metaphysical value-judgments, his sense of life, for all to see. As
Rand puts it, "nothing is as potent as art in exposing the essence of
a man's character. An artist reveals his naked soul in his work
…."[31] Sartre saw the same phenomenon. Literary artists, he wrote,
are noted for "the involuntary expression of their souls. I say
involuntary because the dead, from Montaigne to Rimbaud, have painted
themselves completely, but without having meant to — it is something
they have simply thrown into the bargain."[32] They could hardly have
done otherwise, however, Sartre notes, for [i]f I fix on canvas or in
writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on
someone's face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having
produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where
there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of
things. That is, I feel myself essential in relation to my creation.
[33]

For when it comes to "the unique point of view from which the author
can present the world," it is always and everywhere true that "if our
creative drive comes from the very depths of our heart, then we never
find anything but ourselves in our work."[34]

But of course, all this is true of historians as well. Most historians
are no more philosophically minded than most fiction writers. On the
contrary, they are notoriously "sceptical of abstraction," as John
Gray put it not long ago in the New Statesman.[35] Yet every work they
produce has philosophical implications, provides support for various
general ideas — ideas about the nature of government, for example, and
the utility of war, and the way national economies work. Where do
these ideas come from, in the works of unphilosophical historians wary
of "loose generalization" (as Gray puts it)? Some of them are
inherited, so to speak, from earlier practitioners of the historian's
particular area of specialization. Some are absorbed unthinkingly from
the culture in which the historian grows up and matures. Still others
are provided by a sense of life. For every historian has a sense of
life, just as every fiction writer does — a set of "metaphysical value-
judgments" built up subconsciously over years of living until they
provide a sort of "automatic response to the world" and an automatic
answer to such questions as "whether the universe is knowable or not,
whether man has the power of choice or not, whether he can achieve his
goals in life or not." How any given historian has inwardly answered
such questions will exercise considerable influence over what that
historian regards as a realistic view of government, war, and
economics — and, thus, how that historian treats these subjects in his
or her work.

It is little wonder, then, that Roy A. Childs, Jr., ever an assiduous
student of Ayn Rand, offered the following definition of history in
his influential essay, "Big Business and the Rise of American
Statism": "History is a selective recreation of the events of the
past, according to a historian's premises regarding what is important
and his judgment concerning the nature of causality in human
action."[36] Childs saw clearly that the historian proceeds much as
the fiction writer proceeds, and obtains similar results. Nor was he
alone in doing so. John Tosh writes that "[i]n many instances the
sources do not directly address the central issues of historical
explanation at all. … Questions of historical explanation cannot,
therefore, be resolved solely by reference to the evidence. Historians
are also guided … by their reading of human nature ….[37] The
legendary economist and social theorist Ludwig von Mises notes that
any historical writing "is necessarily conditioned by the historian's
world view" and stresses the importance of what he calls "the
understanding" in making sense of historical evidence.

The historian's genuine problem is always to interpret things as they
happened. But he cannot solve this problem on the ground of the
theorems provided by all other sciences alone. There always remains at
the bottom of each of his problems something which resists analysis at
the hand of these teachings of other sciences. It is these individual
and unique characteristics of each event which … the historian can
understand … because he is himself a human being.[38]

More recently, the historian John Lewis Gaddis has proposed that every
historian approaches his subject with certain assumptions, based on
personal experience, about "how things happen" in the world —
assumptions about "the way the world is," [39] the way the world
works. "Sorting out the difference between how things happen and how
things happened,"Gaddis writes, "involves more than just changing a
verb tense. It's an important part of what's involved in achieving [a]
closer fit between representation and reality."[40]

But if the historical enterprise can be difficult to distinguish from
the fictional enterprise (particularly in light of the concept,
introduced some four decades ago by Truman Capote, of the "non-fiction
novel"),what does this imply about so-called "historical fiction"? Is
there any reason a reader should place any more confidence in the work
of an historian than in the work of an historical novelist? The answer
is that everything depends on what historian we're talking about, what
novelist we're talking about, and what kind of historical fiction
we're talking about.

______________________

This article is excerpted from Why American History Is Not What They
Say: An Introduction to Revisionism.
Notes

[1] Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1938), p. 241.

[2] Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 123.

[3] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the
American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), pp. 44–45.

[4] Ibid., p. 45.

[5] Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud —
American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesisles,
Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 18-19.

[6] Ibid., p. 19.

[7] Ibid., pp. 21-22.

[8] Claire Sprague, Edgar Saltus (New York: Twayne, 1968), p. 72.

[9] James Hurt, "Sandburg's Lincoln Within History." Journal of the
Abraham Lincoln Association. Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter 1999), p. 55.

[10] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New
Directions in the Study of Modern History (London: Longman, 1991), pp.
23–24.

[11] See Douglas Martin, "Shelby Foote, Historian and Novelist, Dies
at 88." The New York Times 29 June 2005.

[12] White, op. cit., p. 122.

[13] Ibid., pp. 83-84.

[14] Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1987), pp. ix — x.

[15] Ibid., p. 4.

[16] Ibid., p. 24.

[17] Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 9.

[18] The last of my three examples of metaphor is attributed to the
French poet, novelist, and playwright Philippe Auguste Mathias de
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838–1889). The second example is taken from
the title of a hit popular song of 1972, written and performed by the
rhythm and blues band War.

[19] Sartre published works of technical philosophy (Being and
Nothingness), novels (Nausea), and plays (No Exit). Rand did the same
(Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Atlas Shrugged, The Night
of January 16th). Gass's case is a bit different. He received his
Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell and calls his meeting with Ludwig
Wittgenstein there in the 1950s "the most important intellectual
experience of my life." (Fiction and the Figures of Life, p. 248) He
earned his living as a philosophy professor for nearly fifty years,
first at Purdue, latterly at Washington University in St. Louis, from
which he retired in 2001. His publications have all been literary in
character, including novels (Omensetter's Luck), short stories (In the
Heart of the Heart of the Country), belles lettres (On Being Blue),
and literary criticism (Fiction and the Figures of Life).

[20] William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York:
Knopf, 1970), pp. 3, 5.

[21] Ibid., pp. 7-9.

[22] Ibid., p. 60.

[23] Ibid., pp. 10-11.

[24] Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (New
York: World, 1969), pp. 79, 50, 28.

[25] Ibid., p. 23.

[26] Ibid., pp. 31-32.

[27] Ibid., pp. 34-35.

[28] Ibid., p. 46.

[29] Ibid., pp. 43-44.

[30] Ibid., p. 22.

[31] Ibid., p. 55.

[32] Jean Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism (New York:
Citadel, 1962), p. 32.

[33] Ibid., p. 39.

[34] Ibid., pp. 63, 40.

[35] See his review of Peter Watson's Ideas: A History from Fire to
Freud in the New Statesman for May 28, 2005.

[36] Roy A. Childs, Jr., "Big Business and the Rise of American
Statism," in Liberty Against Power: Essays by Roy A. Childs, Jr., ed.
Joan Kennedy Taylor (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1994), p. 18.

[37] Tosh, op. cit., p. 141.

[38] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Third
Revised Edition. (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 49.

[39] This phrase has long been associated with the American
philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1998). Anyone interested in Ayn
Rand's concept of a sense of life would profit from reading Goodman's
classic 1960 essay "The Way the World Is," reprinted recently in Peter
J. McCormick, ed. Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 3-10.

[40] John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map
the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 106-107.