Story and History

Abstract

Belief in an objectively founded difference between fact and fiction and in our ability to distinguish unproblematically between them is a commonly accepted premise of our sense of history. It is as if we think that our historical awareness results directly from the contemplation of historical data either by direct confrontation with ‘facts’ or as mediated in histories. The facts or data are felt to be stored without interference in a kind of master file in some rational part of the mind. Once there, of course, the historical data may in Coleridgean fashion become the raw material for the imagination to work on, but the objectivity and the rationality of our approach to the data remain untainted. Although this positivist view must be assumed to be still widely accepted by today’s reading public, it is hardly tenable once we begin to scrutinize the phenomenology of history. Indeed, among professional historians the positivist attitude has been deprived of its monopoly for a considerable time, with the publication of R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History in 1946 as the first sustained challenge to established opinion in English historiography.

‘There is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.’ (Doctorow quoted in Trenner, 1983, p. 26)