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23 The Distinction of Nonfiction (Dubrow 14). Wilkinson focuses on the tension between a historian’s need for a standard against which to measure the truth claims made by a set of facts presented as evidence, and the impossibility of establishing a stable standard out of knowledge that is always constructed and partial (interested and incomplete), because it is generated from texts and interpretations of texts (85). Wilkinson cannot solve this conundrum , but he does explain how, in terms of practice, historians create a provisional working ground. Evidence, which is conventional and exists within a methodological and epistemological tradition, is endowed with validity by a community of scholars. Wherever the ground is located, be it in continually expanding stores of data, in memory, in official records or long-neglected archives or anecdotal information, it is bound to shift and it offers only a provisional foundation for constructing partial truths. In reading nonfiction literature, it is crucial to consider the status of its facts and its evidence with an eye toward discerning its internal standards for validity and the claim it makes to authority within a local and historical context. A final term that requires attention is document. Inheriting from Latin the meaning of example or warning and the root meaning of a teaching, written documents afford our principal access to past and present realities that lie outside of our direct experience. They are the textualized remains of the past, and as such they are constructed in language and in relationship to other documents. There is neither immediacy nor transparency here, but a highly mediated reconstruction of irrecuperable events. Nonfiction literature, which is fact- and evidence-heavy, makes a commitment to verifiable documents, but this commitment may be more or less explicit in the text, and more or less consistently honored. Varying degrees of documentation will be noted in the examples of Mexican nonfiction chosen for this study, and our expectations for the presence of reliable, verifiable sources for a given genre will be examined. References to historiography in the discussion of nonfiction literary writing and its employment of evidence and documents are virtually unavoidable. Like the forms of literature under study in this book, history writing has as its referent the proper name and the records of events occurring in a documentable time and place. Further, because historiography has been far more extensively theorized than nonfiction literature, it provides a wealth of critical approaches that can be productively employed in reading nonfiction. Theories and methods of writing history underwent significant, even radical, changes in the twentieth 24 Documents in Crisis century, moving rapidly away from Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum, previously cited, that history properly done records the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (as it actually happened). This ideal, commonly held to be the essence of nineteenth-century “scientific history,” in fact already came under question by some of Ranke’s contemporaries, but in the twentieth century there is no doubt that the goal of capturing the past “as it really was” has been eclipsed by new concerns and new projects. Modern linguistics, structuralism and post-structuralism, and feminism and ethnic studies figure prominently among the fields that have prompted a radical rethinking of the historian’s role in creating and not merely recording knowledge about the past. In books and articles published since the 1970s, historian Hayden White has been a leading voice in opening up the field of history to the questions posed by contemporary literary theory and philosophy, and the imprint of his work can be seen in virtually all of the ground covered thus far in this chapter.7 White provokes this opening through an interrogation of what he calls the “tropics of discourse,” understood as the ways in which historiography is figurative, dependent on tropes, to the same degree as fictional narrative. Both history and fiction share the same narrative forms, and these forms shape or configure the story being told (Tropics 121–122). His chapter titles such as “The History Text as Literary Artifact” and “The Fictions of Factual Representation” have become catch phrases for his denial of a strict opposition of history to fiction, preferring to emphasize that historical narratives are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (Tropics 82, emphasis...

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