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CHAPTER TEN “I Have Had Some Satisfactory Times”: The Yellowstone Kelly Novels of Peter Bowen GREGORY L. MORRIS Over the past several decades,history in general—and western American history in particular—has grown ever more difficult to write. What might be called a crisis in historiography has problematized the ways in which historians conceive of and describe the past.Questions of apprehension,questions about the nature of the historical consciousness, and questions of our intellectual relation to the past have complicated the historian’s task. Questions about the nature of the historical, about the varied and slippery forms that it might assume have also made the job of writing history an uncertain one. Indeed, when history itself is reconceived as narrative, as a specific form of discourse, subject (one might say) to subjectivity, then how does one go about transforming event into language? When history itself is imagined as text, how does the historian translate that text into yet another? But such is the state of contemporary historiography. The act of writing history has become, for some, an act of recomposition, of formulating new texts and “new myths” out of the broad lexicon of historical event. Making the enterprise more difficult is the revised relation among many historians to historical“fact.”Postmodern historiography is, at best, ambivalent toward the factual. Historical fact has grown indeterminate, subjective; the apprehension of fact has, indeed, become a matter of perception, of the historical angle of vision assumed by the historian writing the history from those facts. As historian Hayden White argues, in constructing and delineating the historical record as text, the historian—like the poet and the fiction writer—selects and deploys various “tropes,” an act that basically liberates the historian from the limitations of the factual:“Historians and philosophers of history ...[are] then freed to conceptualize history, to perceive its contents, and to construct nar- GREGORY L. MORRIS 181 rative accounts of its processes in whatever modality of consciousness is most consistent with their own moral and aesthetic aspirations”(434). Moreover, if historical event is imagined as text, then the historian engages in the interpretive , hermeneutic act every time she or he approaches those events. All of this is meaningful for the writer of historical fiction—and, for our purposes,the writer of western American historical fiction—who writes under the influences of this altered historical and historiographical consciousness. The tradition of historical fiction for so many years has been one rooted in the notion of verisimilitude, in the idea of paying faithful and realistic duty to events-as-they-were even while the writer participates in a fictive discourse. This“paradigm of verisimilitude,”as David K. Herzberger calls it (7), assumes a relatively confident belief in a knowable reality-of-the-past; it also assumes the writer’s objective ability to apprehend and replicate that reality in the language of fiction. But postmodern historiography has thrown the art of historical fiction into crisis. The paradigm of verisimilitude has broken down; the nature of historical perception has been revealed in all its ambiguity and subjectivity.As Lionel Grossman has noted:“For many . . . 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 . . . [has become] the very condition of historical knowledge” (215). Consequently, the historical fictionist has had to redefine his or her relation to the past and to the “problem of pastness,” as Russel Nye describes it (146).For many writers of recent historical fiction,the aim has been to “transcend the narrowly historistic” (Henderson 12), to dissolve the paradigm of verisimilitude, and to create what various critics—including Barbara Foley—have described as“metahistorical fiction.”For Foley,“the metahistorical novel takes as its referent a historical process that evades rational formulation; its documentary effect derives from the assertion of the very indeterminacy of factual verification”(25).Both the novelist and her or his protagonists—especially those who narrate their own stories—become“creative historians”(Foley 195) who self-consciously represent a nonrepresentative object: the amorphous, indefinite flow of historical process. Complicating the task of the western metahistorical novelist’s task in particular is the recent critical literary concern with authenticity—or more accurately , with the argument against authenticity as a criterion upon which to judge western writing. This argument has been led by Nathaniel Lewis, who in the introduction to his book, Unsettling the West: Authenticity...

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