Cushing Strout
THE VERACIOUS IMAGINATION
For many modernist and "postmodernist" writers his–
tory is a nightmare from which they are trying to escape. This at–
titude contrasts sharply with George Eliot's call for stories con–
structed by "the veracious imagination," working out " the var–
ious steps by which a political or social change was reached,
using all extant evidence and supplying deficiencies by careful
analogical creation." Her terms recognize that the historical spirit
and the literary imagination can be synergistic in producing a
kind of analogical history. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand,
spoke as a modernist when she complained that E. M. Forster's
gift for observation got in the way of his poetry because "sober
fact," of which good biography is made, can only be a "rest and
refreshment" for a "tired imagination." This invidious distinc–
tion between history and fiction ignores their common territory.
The historical element in literature is not restricted to a special
genre, for as Georg Lukacs observed in
The Historical Novel,
"we cannot separate the historical novel in the narrower sense
from the fortunes of the novel in general," which made it possible.
Modern historians, with their quantitative methods and
analytical interest in synchrony, might seem to be far removed
from the narrative novel, but some distinguished contemporary
historians have affirmed their affinity with it. The southern his–
torian
C.
Vann Woodward, for example, told a group of his fellow
scholars in 1969 that "our kinship is actually much closer to
novelists" than to social scientists, and in his presidential address
to the American Hist.orical Association in 1981, the colonial his–
torian Bernard Bailyn warned historians that they were in danger
of forgeuing that narrative organization is essential to any act of
synthesis that would capture the drama of social change. A dozen
years earlier
J.
B. Hexter, professor of English history, had chal–
lenged positivistic philosophers and historians by arguing that
writing histories necessa rily entails the use of rhetorical tech–
niques as essential elements in making character, place, and milieu
intelligible . Narrative is no: the only method of either the histo–
rian or the novelist, but both are committed to finding truth in
