Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage

CHAPTER I: The Postmodern Challenge

15 chapter 1 The Postmodern Challenge Countless are the stories [récits] of the world.” Thus starts the classic work of French structuralist narratology, a celebrated study penned by Roland Barthes (1966). Consequently, the scope of the theory of récit, now generally called narratology, became indefinitely large. The “narratological imperialism” rolled over long-established boundaries between text types and genres of writing. In particular, it erased the traditional boundary between fictional and historical narrative. This is the ammunition needed for launching the postmodern challenge to the integrity of history. 1. The Fatal Equation To explain the profound impact of the postmodern challenge, let me briefly summarize two basic assumptions of the modern study of history, one ontological, the other epistemological, which were aptly formulated by François Châtelet in the introduction to his study of the birth of historiography : The historical Spirit believes in the reality of the past, and maintains that the past, in its mode of being and, to a certain extent, in its content , is not different in nature from the present. Recognizing what is no longer as having been, he acknowledges that what happened did formerly exist, in a specific time and place, just as what now we see exists. . . . That means, in particular, that it is not in any way acceptable to treat what has happened as fictive, as unreal, and that the nonpresence of the past (and of the future) cannot in any manner be identified with nonreality. (1962, 11; qtd. in Le Goff 1992, 10) It is indispensable that the past, which is held to be real and decisive , be studied rigorously insofar as past times are considered as 16 possible worlds of fiction and history having a claim on our attention, insofar as a structure is assigned to them, insofar as their traces are visible in the present. It is necessary that every discourse concerning the past be able to clearly show why—on the basis of which documents, and what evidence—it proposes a particular sequence of events, a particular version, rather than another. It is especially important that great care be taken in dating and locating the event, since the latter acquires historical status only to the extent that it is determined in this way. (21–22; qtd. in Le Goff 1992, 11) Only five years after Châtelet’s principles were spelled out, Roland Barthes published his essay “Le discours de l’histoire” (1967), in which he undermined these foundations of modern historiography. Barthes proposes to look at historical writing as a type of narrative discourse and from this standpoint to reexamine its relationship to fictional narrative: “Does the narration of past events, which, in our culture from the time of the Greeks onwards, has generally been subject to the sanction of historical ‘science,’ bound to the unbending standard of the ‘real’ and justified by the principles of ‘rational’ exposition—does this narration differ, in some specific trait, in some indubitably pertinent feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the epic, the novel, the drama?” (65; 7).1 At the end of his essay Barthes provides an answer, and this answer is negative. Barthes’s argument draws on two sources: linguistic text theory and the postmodern philosophy of language. We might wonder how a structuralist text theory and a poststructuralist linguistic philosophy can complement and support each other, and indeed they do not. Barthes simply leaps from one to the other. In his meticulous analysis of the discourse of narrative history Barthes features two classes of textual devices, formal and thematic. To demonstrate Barthes’s approach, I shall concentrate on two particularly telling cases: shifters among the formal devices and devices of “personal thematic ” among the thematic devices. Shifters, expressions of shifting deixis (in the wide sense), were first described by Otto Jespersen and named and studied by Roman Jakobson (1957). Following Jakobson’s lead, Barthes focuses first on two kinds of shifters in historical discourse. The first kind, shifters of listening, ex- The Postmodern Challenge 17 press the historian’s connection with his sources or with his personal experience: “as I have heard,” “to my knowledge” (66; 8). The second kind of shifters, “the organizers,” “provide explicit points of reference in the text” and thus determine the flow of the discourse: “as we have mentioned above,” “we will say no more about this, etc.” (66–67; 8–9). The shifters of listening...