The Historical Text as Literary Artifact

“histories gain . . . their explanatory effect by . . . making stories out of mere chronicles . . . stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation which I have elsewhere called “emplotment” . . . the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures” (479).

“no given set of casually recorded historical events in themselves constitute a story”: they are only “story elements. 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” (480).

“Considered as potential elements of a story, historical events are value-neutral” (480).

“Historical situations are not inherently tragic, comic, or romantic” (481).

“the more we know about the past, the more difficult it is to generalize about it” (484).

“There is something in a historical masterpiece that cannot be negated, and this non-negatable element is its form, the form which is its fiction” (484).

“Our explanations of historical structures and processes are thus determined more by what we leave out of our representations than by what we put in” (485).

“The historical narrative does not image the things it indicates, it calls to mind images of be things it indicates in the same way that a metaphor does” (485).

“By the very constitution of a set of events in such a way as to make a comprehensible story out of them, the historian changes those events with the symbolic significance of a comprehensible plot-structure” (486).

“Histories, then, are not onl about events but also about the possible sets of relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure” (488).

“the shape of the relationships which will appear to be inherent in the objects inhabiting the field will in reality have been imposed on the field by the investigator in the very act of identifying and describing the objects that he finds there. . . . historians constitute their subjects as possible objects of narrative representation by the very language they use to describe them” (489).

“different kinds of historical interpretations . . . are little more than projections of he linguistic protocols that these historians use to pre-figure that set of events prior to writing their narratives of it” (489).

“drama can be followed by the reader of th narrative in such a way as to be experienced as a progressive revelation of what the true nature of the events consists of” (490).

“If there is an element of the historical in all poetry, there is an element of poetry in every historical account of the world” (491).

“we only know the actual [historical] by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable [fictional]” (491).

“all narrative is not simply a recording of “what happened” in the transition from one static affairs to another, but a progressive redescription of sets of events in such a way as to dismantle a structure encoded in one verbal mode in the beginning so as to justify a recoding of it in another mode at the end” (491).

“In both [fiction and history] we re-recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit comfortably” (492).