Between History and Literature by Lionel Gossman

Introduction

En las palabras de Walpole, la historia es a species of romance that is belived, mientras que una novela es a species of history that is not belived (citado por Gossman 3).

Chapter 7History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification

LA HISTORIA ERA UNA RAMA DE LA LITERATURAFor a long time the relation of history to literature was not notably problematic. History was a branch of literature. It was not until the meaning of the world literature, or the institution of literature itself, began to change, toward the end of the eighteenth century, that history came to appear as something distinct from literature (227). Por mucho tiempo la historia fue una rama de la literatura y no es sino en el siglo XVIII que las palabras literatura e historia comienzan a ser vistas como algo diferente (227).

Quintiliano trata a la historia como una forma de pica (227).

EL RENACIMIENTORenaissance reflection on historiography conformed, as one would expect, to the precepts of the ancients. History writing was viewed as an art of presentation and argument rather than a scientific inquiry, and its problems belonged therefore to rhetoric rather than to epistemology. Though seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of poetry usually left room for a neo-Platonic notion of divine inspiration inherited from the Renaissance, literature had, for the most part, the sense of a practice, a technique (228).

En el renacimiento la historia escrita es vista como un arte de presentacin de un argumento en lugar de una indagacin cientfica y su problemtica es vista como parte de la retrica en lugar de la epistemologa (228).

PEQUEA BRECHA ENTRE ESCRITOR Y LECTORSpeaking of France, Sartre observes that the gap between writer and reader in the seventeenth century was not great. Every reader was himself, in a lesser way, a writer. Literature thus referred to the practice of writing. And historyalong with sermons, eulogies, and letterswas one of the kinds of writing that could be practiced. The subjects varied and required different treatment, but the craft was the same (228). Hablando sobre Francia, Sartre observa que en el siglo XVII la brecha entre escritor y lector no era grande. Todo lector era en menor medida un escritor. La literatura se refera a la prctica de escribir y la historia al igual que los sermones, las elegas y las cartas era uno de los tipos de escritura que podan ser practicadas. Los temas variaban y requeran de tratamiento diferente pero el oficio era el mismo (228).

La historiografa es considerada, hasta el siglo XVIII, un gnero literario (228).

In the final phase of neoclassicism, however, the long association of rhetoric and literature began to break down. The term literature gradually became more closely associated with poetry, or at least with poetic and figurative writing, and especially among the Romantics and their successors, took on the meaning of a corpus of privileged or sacred texts, a treasury in which value, truth, and beauty had been piously stored, and which could be opposed to the empirical world of historical reality and even, to some extent, to historiography as the faithful record of that reality (229)Sin embargo, es al final del neoclasicismo que la larga asociacin que haba entre retrica y literatura comienza a resquebrajarse. Gradualmente, la literatura comienza a asociarse ms con la poesa o, al menos, con la escritura figurativa y potica y, especialmente entre los romnticos y sus sucesores, asumi el significado de un corpus de textos privilegiados o sagrados que haban sido instaurados en el valor, la verdad y la belleza y, el cual, podra ser visto en un lugar opuesto al mundo emprico de la realidad histrica y, hasta un punto, a la historiografa como el record fidedigno de la realidad (229).

DE LA RETRICA A LA POTICA: EL ESCRITOR YA NO ES UN HABLANTE DE IDIOMAS DIVINOSthe modern writer is constantly crossing frontiers and extending outward the limits and possibilities of writing. The focus of the literarys activity, in short, has shifted from rhetoric to poetics. The writer is now not so much a revealer of truths, a speaker of divine language, as a maker of meanings and a restorer of human languages (229).

En el siglo XVIII, por primera vez, la base epistemolgica de su ideal de copiar o de representar imparcialmente lo real fue puesto en duda (230).

SEPARACIN ENTRE HISTORIOGRAFA Y LITERATURAThe separation of literature and historiography was institutionalized, moreover, by the breakup of what had once been the republic of letters a society in which the historians, both of the Enlightenment and of the early Romantic period, especially in France, England, and Scotland, had mingled freely and shared common experiences and aspirations with novelists, poets, philosophers, political thinkers, economists, scientists, and statesmen. In the course of the nineteenth century historians withdrew more and more to the university, to be followed by historians of literature and by literary critics; and thus history, like literary scholarship, passed from the hands of the poet and the man of letters into those of the professor (230).

SE ACABA LA MMESIS ENTRE HISTORIA Y LITERATURAThe old common ground of history and literature the idea of mimesis, and the central importance of rhetorichas thus been gradually vacated by both. The practicing historian is rarely a practicing literary artist (231).

POLOS OPUESTOS?Traditionally, then, history and fictional storytelling confront and challenge each other at opposite poles of narrative practice. The actual development of each, however, reveals both great similarities and some significant tensions. Since each is realized in and through narrative, the forms of the narrative and the view of the world that particular narrative forms convey may well be common to both at any given time (233).

INTERCAMBIOSWe may then discover that while historians are striving to achieve mximum narrative coherency and to approximate to the forms of fiction, certain novelists are trying to undercut these very forms and conventions by an appeal to history (233).

DIFERENCIA ENTRE HISTORIADOR Y POETA SEGN VOLTAIREThe difference between the historian and the epic poet, for Voltaire, thus lay in the nature of the material out of which each composed his work. In the conditions of the modern critical thought the material of the one could no longer be identical with that of the other. Historical material and legendary material were now distinct. Nevertheless, the essential concerns of the epic poet and of the historian, not as scholar but as writer, were the same: careful selection of an appropiate subject matter and skillful narrative composition (235).

Voltaire quera que la historia se convirtiera en una sucesora moderna de la pica (236).

INTERSECCIONES ENTRE LITERATURA E HISTORIA, PG. 239:

SCHILLER, PG. 241:El curso del mundo y el curso de la historia El orden de la historia no es dado, es construido

USO DE LOS TIEMPOS VERBALES, PG. 242:

DISTANCIA ENTRE EL NARRADOR Y LA NARRATIVA:The characteristic feature of eighteenth-century fiction is the ironic distance most eighteenth-century novels establish between the narrator and the narrative, and the complicity they set up between the reader and the narrator over against the narrativethat is to say, the clear distinction they make between discours and histoire, and the privilege they accord to the former. This is also what characterizes Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon as historians. The Enlightenment historian tells his tale under the same conditions as the eighteenth-century novelist, and, like him, engages the reader with him as ironic spectator of the historical scene or tableau (243).

LA HISTORIA EN EL SIGLO XVIII What was important was not the truth of the narrative so much as the activity of reflecting about its truth. History, in the eighteenth century, raised questions and created conditions in which the individual subject, the critical reason, could exercise and assert its freedom. It did not present itself as an objectively true and therefore compelling discovery of reality itself. On the contrary, its truth and validity were always problematic, provoking the readers reflection and thus renewing his freedom. In an important sense, therefore, historical narrative and fictional narrative were constructed in fundamental similar ways in the eighteenth century (244).

EL NARRADOR DEL SIGLO XIX APARECE COMO UN REPORTERO, PGINA 244: The dominant feature of both fictional and historical narrative in the nineteenth century is the replacement of the overt eighteenth-century persona of the narrator by a covert narrator, and the corresponding presentation of the narrative as unproblematic, absolutely binding. The nineteenth-century narrator appears as a privileged reporter recounting what happened. The historical text is not presented as a model to be discussed, criticized, accepted, or repudiated by the free and inquiring intellect, but as the inmost form of the real, binding, and inescapable. In the struggle to establish philosophie, in other words, the eighteenth-century historian accepted his ideological function proudly; in the nineteenth century the historians ideological function and the rhetoric he deployed in its service were denied, in the deepest sense, since the historian himself did not recognize them (244)

CORRESPONDENCIAS ACTUALESIn our own time, there appear to be correspondences between developments in historiography and certain developments in modern fiction among them the repudiation of realism, the collapse of the subject or character as an integrated and integrating entity, and the increasingly acute awareness of the fundamental logic or syntax of narrative and of the constraints and opportunities it provides (244).

SIGLO XIX: LA SUBJETIVIDAD DEL CONOCIMIENTO HISTRICOAbove all, the attach on historical realism, begun in the early nineteenth century, has become more intense and more radical. Nineteenth-century philosophers challenged the naive realism of the classical historians and emphasized the place of subjectivity in historical knowledge. For many who reflected on the problems of historical knowledge, the fact that the knower is himself involved in the historical process as a maker of history and is thus unable to achieve the objective view aspired to by the natural scientist was the very condition of historical knowledge, as opposed to knowledge of the natural world. There was no question, however, that the historians aim was to know and to reveal the reality of the past. Only that reality was now thought of as at once given and conceled, so that the historians job, as Humboldt had said at the beginning of the century in his essay Die Aufgabe des Geschinchtschreibers, was to divine (ahnden) it. The historian was to reach through to past reality by a process of divination or symbolic interpretation of the evidence. Recent reflection on history, like recent reflection on literature, in contrast, has tended increasingly to question the mimetic ideal itself (245).

LA IMAGINACIN DEL HISTORIADORBut many writers have emphasized the important role played by the historians imagination, his concerns as an individual and as a social being, and even by his unconscious, both in the determination of the problem to be studied and in the shaping of the historical narrative (247) y a continuacin cita Hayden White.

LA HISTORIA CONSTRUYE SUS OBJETOS Y ESOS OBJETOS SON OBJETOS DEL LENGUAJEOne of the most effective and radical criticisms of historical realism has been made by highlighting the linguistic existence of historical narratives, by emphasizing that history constructs its objects, and that its objects are objects of language, rather than entities of which words are in some way copies (248)

IMPORTANTE: PGINA 249

LOS SIGNIFICANTESThis historians narrative is constructed not upon reality itself or upon transparent images of it, but on signifiers which the historians own action transforms into signs. It is not historical reality itself but the present signs of the historian that limit and order the historical narrative (just as, conversely, the historical narrative limits and orders them). Almost all historians acknowledge this implicitly in the act of placing their notes sources, evidence at the foot of the page (250).

NARRATIVA HISTRICA: SISTEMA SEMIOLGICO SECUNDARIOI have already suggested that historical narrative constitutes a secondary semiological system whose elements events, actions, and so on already have a meaning within the system of ordinary language, prior to being appropiated by the secondary system and adapted to its ends (251).

REPUDIO DE LA LITERATURA COMO MITO, pgina 252: