RICERCA ITALIANA     

History and Narration

Università degli Studi di Bari

Abstract

The subject of the research project can be summed up in two words – history and fiction. More precisely the aim will be to examine the way in which the relationship between these two notions has evolved over time. The eternal question “what is History?” comes from the classical world (and not from modern age). Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Livy, Plutarch and Polybius are only some examples of writers who dealt - in a ‘practical way’ - with the problem of how History and story-telling are connected (as the word ‘historiography’ etymologically suggests).
Although Lucian’s “The True History” is the only classical pamphlet entirely based on the link between History and story-telling, all classical writers focused on this theme in one way or another. This classical tradition would serve as a frame of reference in subsequent centuries. Indeed, this critical question has been dealt with in every era and all over the world (England, Italy, Germany, France, US).
Choosing a method for relating History has never been a purely historiographic matter. Relating History in a certain manner meant (and still means) interpreting the past with the aim of legitimating the desires and requirements of the present.
The aesthetic representation, that is “fiction”, played a major role in History interpretation (here, the term “Fiction” is to be understood in its wider sense, i.e. a piece of writing which has a plot, whether it is implicit or explicit, plain or complex).
Literary genres often overlapped. Indeed, the rather blurred borderline separating the different genres has led to a great deal of ‘hybrids’. Thorough examination of this question is beyond the scope of this brief presentation. Nonetheless, the researchers involved in this project will analyse these ‘hybrids’ throughout history, from various angles.
At this point, we can only observe how the link between History and fiction has always been evident in encyclopaedia entries. These entries (in encyclopaedias such as Voltaire’s, Bayle’s, Tommaseo’s, or the Oxford Dictionary) represent a crucial starting point for the proposed project.
The nature of plot changes as a consequence of the metamorphosis in the meaning of the words which occurred down the centuries. For precisely this reason the research groups involved in this project will investigate the historical contexts and styles which have been used, from classical antiquity until the 20th century.
This investigation will involve studying the general theoretical aspects (see e.g. the whole annotated bibliography and the particular reference list of each single research group), with particular attention devoted to the historical context and the specific cultural tradition.
The main results of the first stage of the work (bibliographical research) will be discussed in a series of seminars held in each of the participating universities. The seminars will also be attended by scholars from research groups not participating in the project.
At a second stage, each project participant will focus on specific aspects of the research project, related to his/her scientific discipline (indicated in form B). Moreover, a book, including the most interesting conclusions of the research, will be published and presented at an international conference by 2008. <<<

Principal Investigator

Vito Luciano Amoruso Università degli Studi di BARI

Research Objectives

The aim of our research project is to catalogue and analyse forms and modes of historical representation through literature, theatre and cinema, in Europe and in the USA. As shown in the first section of our national and international project and in the bibliography, our research will deal at first with the link between history and narrative, a link already present in classical tradition and even today at heart of historiographical and literary-critical debate.
Subsequently all the members of our national research project, as shown in each research programme presented by the different operating units, will study how forms and modes of the representation of history have undergone changes. They will focus their attention on the relationship between history and narrative, both in Europe and in the USA, through traditions, genders and periods, according to the area of scientific expertise of each unit. Finally they will investigate aspects and themes as explained below:

1) The units will study how historical sources were used in stage productions between the 16th and 17th centuries (particularly, how classical and modern sources were used in the Elizabethan and in the Jacobean theatre, how Shakespeare dealt with history in his History Plays, and how Tudor historiographical sources were used to create the Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, a controversial character who becomes the symbol of national as well as nationalistic virtues). We will also study a number of 12th-century historical epic poems and the interesting ‘patchwork’ effect created by the mixture of contemporary historiographical prose, fiction and conventional textual strategies deriving from classical Latin literature.

2) We will analyse literary tradition during the 18th century, making a comparison among the headwords ‘history’ and ‘historiography’ in Voltaire’s Encyclopedia, Bayle’s Dictionary and Encyclopaedia Britannica (by way of example). Then we will study the relationship between history and narration in Fielding’s and Sterne’s narrative representations.
As far as literature in the 19th century is concerned, we will explore historiographical tradition in the works of Macaulay and Carlyle, and we will focus our attention on the representation of history in Scott’s and Thackeray’s novels, as reference points in the historiographical debate.

3) The relationship between historical reconstruction and history in the art of narrating was one of the main themes in European realism. This relationship, though upset by positivism, went through a crisis at the beginning of the 20th century, as the literary statute of realism was discussed. The outcomes of this crisis led to new tendencies and in the 20th century, both in Europe and in the USA, the relationship between history and narrative took on new literary modes, and the possibility, or the necessity, to narrate history was a central concern, both in a biographical and in a literary sense (as in Heimito von Doderer’s studies). This shift would have left its mark on the whole century (from Joyce, Pirandello, Camus, until the end of the century) and it would have changed the relationship between history and narration both in literature and in cinema.

This is the reason why the members of this project will at first find, classify and study the sources in the main European and American libraries. Then we will compare these sources with the work already done by writers, artists, play-writers, scriptwriters and directors. Finally the collected documents will be discussed and then published in one volume. The results of our research will be presented in an international meeting on “History and narrative” during fall 2008. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

From Herodotus to Benedetto Croce, that is from ancient times to the first half of the 20th century, it has been thought that one of the most important qualities of a historian is to be a good storyteller. Many philosophers, historians and men of letters have been interested in the profile of the different positions (cf. the bibliographical references).
The relationship between History and storytelling was analysed, though in different ways, by Greek and Latin historiographers (Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, etc.), it was discussed by Lucian in his essay “How to write history” and it has continued to thrive in the modern world, as we can see in the opposing contributions of Carr (What is History?) and Elton (The Practice of History). The two different points of view are still at the heart of the debate, although in the last few decades, particularly in Anglo-Saxon culture (Hayden White), new visions have emerged and compromised the meaning of historiography as ‘true tale of facts’.
The Humanists differentiated between ‘annals’, simple and local chronicles, and the rhetorical ‘historiae’; in the 16th and the 17th centuries Machiavelli and Guicciardini expressed their own visions; then in the 18th century we had the entries for “History” and “Historiography” in Voltaire’s Encyclopaedia, in Bayle’s Historical Dictionary in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; the rich Romantic era was followed by Positivism (as we can see in the entry of the Oxford Dictionary); then, at the end of the 19th century we had the denial of history by Friedrich Nietzsche, followed by the crisis of realism in the 20th century. These are some of the various ways in which History has been interpreted and the relationship between History and storytelling defined; all of the subjects can be developed and surely need to be investigated further.
Down the centuries the relationship between History and storytelling has involved men of letters and artists (in the 20th century even cinema and photography have offered new visions) who, though not concerned with the theoretical and philosophical debate, tried in their works to answer the question about how to relate History. Henry James, in his famous review of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”, wrote: “If we write our novels in this way, how will we write about history of facts?”. It wasn’t easy to answer James’s question; it was culturally and ideologically rooted in the rich debate that spread in England, from the first decades of the 19th century, and that involved intellectuals such as Macaulay, Carlyle and many others, who aknowledged that novel had the quality to tell History. In May 1836, an article - Irish Tale - issued on the "Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine" rethorically asked "who is there who must not observed in general conversation, that the notions of bygone times and characters, most interesting to us in a national point of view, are more often taken from the umperishable novels of Sir Walter Scott and others, rather than from the documents of more sober research".
Many years went by, and Henry James wrote that "The subject matter of history was collected in documents and archives". Conrad agreed with that idea when he decided to write some short stories settled in France during the post-Napoleonic era: "The Duel". This short story tells History through the tale of just two rival of an endless duel and in this way tells and shows a whole generation and a nation, the whole Europe. Conrad echoed the need expressed by James and expressed them in that beautiful incipit of Marlow's tale in "Heart of darkness": and also this was the heart...
The bibliographical references are the basis of our national and international project and the point of departure for all the members of our research programme, who will catalogue, define and study the modes and the forms through which the relationship between History and storytelling has characterized the European and American literary tradition.
Our research starts from the ancient and blooming relationship between History and storytelling, to analyse the forms of its crack and decay in the literature (novel, poetry and drama) of the second half of the XX century, keeping within the bounds of English and German languages and cultures. The epistemology of the beginning of the century put this relationship in a difficult position, with the revision of the processes of signification made by linguistics.
If History and storytelling once cooperated in establishing and giving form to truth, today we think that the relationship between the word and its meaning is the result of a convention, a difficult and shifting relationship, dependent on reading conditions. There have been a series of changes, in the form of the novel (from Flaubert on), in the theoretical debates on the scientific statute of history (from Croce to Toynbee and White), in the crisis of the ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard), messages that excluded their own universality and lasting intelligibility, and thus, at the end of the day, replaced history in the traditional sense.
The literature of the second half of the 20th century shows the difficulty of understanding and telling – the difficulty of meshing together the two ancient arts of memory and persuasion. <<<