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PARTISAN REVIEW
sponsor theories about "nonfiction novels" or "metahistories"
in which either fact or fiction as a category is blown up so far as
to swallow the other voraciously with nothing left over.
Though Aristotle's distinction between poetry and history
is too rigid, it can usefully suggest that the histor.ian's truth will
always have to be more literal than the artist's, just as the artist 's
is bound to be more figurative than the historian's, because the
historian is always constrained by public evidence, while the art–
ist, even in a historical novel , has some vital freedom to invent
and to transform. Written history itself, of course, is never merely
"wie es eigentlich gewesen,"-what
actually happened, as event
alone, the phrase our nineteenth-century positivists used to bor–
row out of context from Ranke. Because actions have purposes
and meanings, historical events are necessarily imagined as ele–
ments of a human story, which did not exist in just that form be–
fore. Historians and novelists are necessarily allies because, for
both, narrating involves the art of evoking persons and places as
well as the making of explanations that render intelligible the
actions constituting the drama.
Today, in some quarters, the voracious imagination severs
literature from history and resolves history into rhetoric. Its an–
tidote is the veracious imagination, which travels in that border
country where history and fiction overlap, while preserving as
well a vital tension. Narration, says the Spanish philosopher
Ortega, "implies that the narrated events are essentially clear and
not problematic." Nothing in modern fiction or historiography,
however, warrants this assertion. These disciplines can express
their truths only in
complex
narratives.
To narrate
comes from
narrare,
whose Latin stem means
knowing. To tell
is also, in
English,
to relate,
which means
to connect.
In
his novel
Howard's
End
E. M. Forster once urged upon us a moral: "Only connect
the prose and the passion of life."
It
is a link that the best novels
and histories always forge for their readers. He thought it was a
very difficult one to make, and so it is as well for the linkage of
history and fiction. Yet both historian and artist can converge
because they can share an attitude expressed by our philosopher,
William James: "I am finite once and for all, and all the catego–
ries of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world
as such,
and with things that have a history.... I have neither eyes nor
