Fictional and Historical Worlds by Jonathan Hart (review)

Jonathan Hart’s Fictional and Historical Worlds attempts to collapse the distinction between the titular concepts and demonstrate how the imaginary (fiction) and the actual (historicity) are inherently dialectical. Hart champions the activity of literary interpretation and narrative formation but emphasizes that such an approach must always be anchored in the empirical world of action and practice. In the debate on the precedence of metaphysics and ideology in the arts, and quantitative positivism in empirical science, Hart adopts a middle ground, avoiding what he sees as the relativism of deconstructionist/postmodern thought, while also challenging the reductive tendencies of any scientific claim to truth in literary scholarship. Accordingly, Hart theorizes fictional and historical worlds not as constituting discrete categories but rather as occurring at the dialectical intersection of the imaginary and the actual, theory and practice, art and science, literature and history.

Hart traces the evolution of the age-old debate between literary mimesis and historical verisimilitude over the first three chapters, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to the turning point in Leibniz’s possible worlds theory, which collapses the distinction between mere representation and empirical reflection. In chapter 4, “Translating the New World,” Hart explores the influence of European geopolitics on the moral tenor of the “discovery” narratives of the New World. Spain’s initial dominance in overseas colonial conquest informed the way English and French cosmographers wrote the empire: they could only “emulate, modify, and oppose the texts and images from Spain.” Depending on geopolitical allegiances, Spanish imperialism was written/translated as either benevolent Providence or a merciless clash of civilizations. Hart effectively demonstrates how such prominent historical narratives of Spanish conquest are informed as much by actual events (historicity) as they are by narrative translation with a geopolitical spin.

Chapter 6, “Continental European Empire,” briefly recounts other past European empires in an attempt to break down monolithic conceptions of Anglo-American imperialism. However, in addition to addressing the discontinuities of these past empires, Hart could also have traced the continuities of empire that proliferate to this day. Only once does Hart suggest that “some argue that the United States is an empire,” while buffering this vague admission with the bare contention that “others say it was the first agent of decolonization in the First British Empire.” The lack of citations aside, Hart’s pluralization of the history of empire comes at the expense of acknowledging the continuities between this history and the imperial present. Hart’s analysis would benefit from current criticism on globalization and the transformation of empire into an increasingly trans-national and deterritorialized American hegemony.

Exploring genre in chapter 8, Hart demonstrates that though realism and comedy are traditionally associated with “representing and escaping the world, respectively,” they often blur these mimetic lines in their fictional worlds. Likewise, in his analysis of new historicism in chapter 9, Hart suggests that Stephen Greenblatt destabilizes notions of the truth of historical writing and academic criticism by using a method that incorporates “analogy, metaphor and narrative.”

In chapter 10, “Culture, Recognition, and Poetry,” Hart destabilizes the distinction between historian, critic, and poet by demonstrating how each subscribes to generic conventions in an attempt to translate reality into meaningful narrative. In chapter 11, “Shakespeare Past and Present,” Hart examines the multiple layers of time negotiated in contemporary performances of Shakespeare, which foregrounds the problem of “embodiment of the present in representations of the past.” Hart argues that the fictional and/or historical worlds of Shakespeare require a translational engagement with a “doubleness” of time: a negotiation between the pastness of Shakespeare’s oeuvre as recreated in our present and the additional layer of pastness depicted in his historical plays (the past of the Elizabethan present). Finally, in chapter 12, “Bunyan’s Apology for His Progress,” Hart suggests that the preface to The Pilgrim’s Progress is an interpolation that blurs the line between authorial responsibility and mimetic verisimilitude: Bunyan alternates between reluctant author of his sensational fiction and mere providential conduit of allegorical/typological history.

Hart’s Fictional...