History, a Literary Artifact?: The Traveling Concept of Narrative in/on Historiographic Discourse

The “Mutual” Relationship Between History and Narrative

Ever since its ancient days, history (oral, written, or otherwise mediated) has been traveling across and between the boundaries of fact-based sciences and of (imaginary) literature. It seems quite telling that Herodotus as well as Thucydides are considered founding fathers of occidental history. Herodotus, born in Halicarnassus in the fifth century b.c., is most well known for his monumental work The Histories, based on the wars between the Greeks and the Persians (499–79 b.c.). In his attempt to report on events and, especially, on the conflicts between warring nations, Herodotus makes deliberate use of literary techniques, such as ring composition, psychonarration, and direct speech. He not only describes events but also provides insight into the thoughts and feelings of historical agents. In addition, he refrains from giving an authoritative account of past events and their cause-effect relations. On the contrary, his narrative is interspersed with hearsay, speculation, myths, and different versions of events contributed by different eyewitnesses or involved parties. Herodotus leaves ample room for the audience to form an opinion of its own. He frequently comments on his sources and on his manner of presenting them: “Anyone can adopt whichever of these alternative stories he finds most plausible; in any case, I have stated my own opinion”; “I will report views about this country shared by other people as well as by the Egyptians. This will be supplemented as well by what I personally saw” (2008, 2:147, 154).¹

Simon Schama, one of the most popular contemporary British historians, is completely charmed by Herodotus’s manner of recording history and offers this description: “His relish for gossip, his intuitive understanding of the idiosyncrasies of climate and geography, his primitive ethnography, his unabashed subjectivities, the winning mishmash of hearsay and record, real and fantastic” (1989, 325).

In contrast to his immediate predecessor and fellow historian Herodotus, Thucydides (c. 460 b.c.–c. 395 b.c.), author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, approached the art of writing history from a different, what we would today call a more scientific angle. He took as his model the new methodology of Hippocratic doctors, who had taken to recording medical data (symptoms as well as treatments and their effects) in order to be able to more accurately diagnose a complaint in the future (Southgate 2011, 133). Thucydides hoped that he could apply a similar method to history and, by meticulously collecting historical data, deduce from them general laws applicable to human nature and behavior. He thus established a tradition of authoritative historical/political realism based on the recording of facts about contemporary political and military events taken, as Thucydides claims, from unequivocal, eyewitness accounts (see Thucydides 1910, 1:23).

The two Greek historians from the fifth century b.c. illustrate well the different traditions of Western history-writing coming to life in its ancient cradle. On the one hand, there is fact-based history, considered a science among others, such as medicine or arithmetic, and, on the other hand, there is history as one of the humanities, open to interpretation and a variety of meanings, considered a form of literary/aesthetic art, such as poetry or rhetoric. Both Herodotus and Thucydides wrote narrative accounts of the past; that is, they use narrative discourse with a fabula and a plot line to recount what happened. In fact, their narrative practices aren’t altogether that different from one another. Both try to create a lively and detailed picture of events, and both use narrative devices borrowed from literary arts. Even though Thucydides claims to record only well-established fact, he also provides insight into historical agents’ perspectives, expectations, and motives, a technique that Grethlein describes as “side-shadowing” (2010, 323), a term coined by Gary Saul Morson in Narrative and Freedom (1994). “Side-shadowing” is used to (re)create the “presentness” of the past, that is, a kind of in actu atmosphere, in which we, for example, directly witness a character ponder an issue or look with him or her down a...