Narrating the Gulf: Literary Evidence for History

Abstract

It is a given nowadays to speak of history and narrative as basically sharing the same properties and directions. Borderlines are no longer as strongly demarcated as they were in the heyday of literary writing in the last century, when “new critics” exercised close analysis of the makeup of texts without contexts. With the conspicuous rhetorical turn in the humanities and social sciences under the strident poststructuralist theories and global economic decentralization processes there is more conflation than separation. Narrative and history sound synonymously applicable to any art that has something to tell: an anecdote, a happening, even a piece of news. Hayden White’s writings were received with this understanding among generations of scholars who were told that in each work of fiction there is a blurred component of hi/story.¹ Gérard Genette and the French school provide many sophisticated proposals in this context.² The dominating postmodernist mode with a strong deconstructionist bent can no longer accept a one-sided view of reading that deprives readers from an understanding that is wider than the mechanics of a text. This may fail to account for the place of a text in knowledge formation processes; the text assumes more meaning in relation to other texts that make up an attitude or a movement. This is a dynamic that operates no less in narrative than history.