Abstract
The ‘fictionalization of history’ has been in recent times a muchdebated issue for theorists of historiography. Hayden White, in particular, argues that, when told by the historian, the meaningless and arbitrary sequences that reach our experience in the form of res factae need to be given coherence and conclusiveness in the form of res fictae if historical narratives are to capture and communicate a specific social reality and to attribute a certain meaning to it.1
Not truth, but things like truth
George Chapman
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Notes
White’s most conspicuous contribution is his book Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). In a concise form, his idea of ‘emplotment’ as an explanatory tool is the following: ‘By emplotment I mean simply the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot-structures, in precisely the way that Fiye has suggested is the case with “fictions” in general. … The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like — in short, all the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play.’ ‘Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, in R. H. Kanary and H. Kozicki (eds), The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 41–62, 46, 47)
History as a literary genre is also treated in P. Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1971) and H. R. Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung.
See also E. Scarano and D. Diamanti (eds), La scrittura della stork (Pisa: T.E.P., 1991).
The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, ed. R. J. Lordi (Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur: Universität Salzburg, 1977), p. 41.
The cognitive function of fictional strategies in historical narratives, Jauss argues, has been ignored owing to the biased opinion that the res factae are separable, in content as well as in form, from the res frctae. Fictionalisation in history, Jauss says, does not simply mean to use fictional instruments in historical narratives. Rather, it should be recognised that ‘the res factae are not a primum’ and that no event is simply raw fact: therefore, some kind of fictionalisation is inherent in the historical experience, because the content of a historical event ‘is conditioned from the start by the perspective from which it is perceived or reconstructed, but also by the mode of its exposition or interpretation’ (Asthetische Erfahrung, p. 374, Italian transl.). A similar claim is made by P. Nora, ‘L’évènement monstre’, Communications XVIII (1972), 162–72.
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© 1996 Paola Pugliatti
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Pugliatti, P. (1996). The Fictionalisation of History and the Issue of Verisimilitude. In: Shakespeare the Historian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_6
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