Imagination, representation, narration. On the literary quality of historical writing

Abstract

The article discusses three theories of the representation of historical past — Collingwood’s, Veyne’s and White’s. The first was considered too naive, the second too skeptical, and the third as aimed openly against the reality of history. According to the author, however, they all reflect our longing for the past, yet each of them corresponds to another moment of it. The first to the longing for closeness, the second for strangeness, and the third for a principle. All these theories, even though different from each other, address the narrative aspect of historiography — its novel-like quality — with equal force. Each of the three historians confronts a historian with a writer. For Collingwood, a historian works using his imagination, like a novelist, to reenact the past. For Veyne, the author of history was an author of a novel, since like a writer he was forced to create cohesive and interesting narrations from the pieces of history, passing over the gaps in fragmentary sources. Whereas White remarked that a historian is always a narrator who, not unlike a novelist, structures his story according to a certain a priori determined pattern — thus he pointed out the similarity between historiography and belles-lettres at the deep structure level.