Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (review)

Any intellectual comment that deals with imperfection, with the failings of the human race and of its productions under whatever form, ought to be welcomed in a time when all too many fervently argue for the possibility or, more childishly, the actual achievement of all kinds of sublunar perfection. Imperfection may be rightly said to be the metaphysical foundation of human beings in general, but Ann Rigney's book has a narrower focus. She tries to show her readers that both history and fiction are less, as well as more, than they claim or are conventionally thought to be. At the same time, she provides useful examinations of the manner in which the two are engaged in a fruitful (if sometimes invidious) dialectic. Her book is slim in text, rich in bibliography. The introduction (1-12) and the last chapter (121-42) are theoretical. There are two substantial and meritorious chapters, one on Sir Walter Scott (13-58) and the other on Romantic French historians (59-98), and a weaker and perfunctory one on Thomas Carlyle (99-120).

The general topic is an age-old one, although one would not notice it by reading Rigney. Already Aristotle spoke in his Poetics (somewhat tangentially) about the connections and interactions between literature and history. Sir Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poetry provides a detailed, even tortured, parallel of poetry to history to show not only their similarities of intention but, at bottom, the superiority of the former to the latter. Others followed Aristotle's and Sidney's example with varying success, in any case long before the otherwise interesting musings of Gyorgy von Lukács that are taken by most of our contemporaries (including Rigney) as the starting point for such studies. The formulations of Sidney are, as a matter of fact, more radical than those of either von Lukács or his followers.

One other fact that is often overlooked is that any novel is a "historical" novel. The most realistic and most topically contemporary text is, willy-nilly, a few minutes behind the facts it purports to depict: simultaneity is the greatest illusion of all. Moreover, the "contemporary" tends to fade away and fall into the "historical." The works of Jane Austen and John Dos Passos are now read by most as historical novels, though nothing was farther from their authors' minds, and our students see little difference in time frame between Middlemarch and Romola. We have often to fall back on the much-maligned authorial intention if we want to distinguish a true "historical novel" from its brethren.

That is why I would highlight as particular merits of the book the way in which Rigney weaves into it (e.g., 42-43 and later). Scott's abundant prefaces, notes, and so on, which are all too often ignored by critics, although they are essential elements of the great novelist's writings. (Another gaping hole in Scott research is represented by the failure of critics to deal with his nonfictional prose: the writings on Dryden, Swift, witchcraft and demonology, ethnology, and the like. Studies of this kind would show the seriousness of Scott's project and the ways in which he is closer to Burke than to Dumas, much as one may prize the French master.) Rigney's first chapter also presents one of the best applications known to me of the Jaussian methodology of "horizon of expectations" through her continuous references of contemporary reviews to Sir Walter's Old Mortality. Among other ingenious and original sections one can enumerate the parallel in dignity between (traditional) historiography and tragedy (68) and, equally, the opening section on cemetery inscriptions (13-16). Over and beyond this, Rigney's study is unquestionably sound, rational, and welcome for its examination of the connection between the fictional and the documentary. What Scott and many other...