E. L. Doctorow on the Novelist and the Historian

Recently the Atlantic published a special issue, Fiction 2006, that for reasons I cannot quite figure out, they do not bother to send subscribers. Their most loyal readers, the ones who provide much of their liquidity -- a guaranteed cash flow annually, essentially are asked to go out and spend more money on a magazine to which we have already committed. That aside, there are several significant essays in the special issue (including a great article by and interview with Francine Prose on reading to write, and a Megan Marshall essay on campus fiction.) but the one on which I want to focus my gaze is E. L. Doctorow's "Notes on the History of Fiction" which drew my attention (and my anticipated concern) with its subtitle: "Who would give up the Iliad for the 'real' historical record?" It was the scare quotes, I admit it. The little quotation marks around "real" that implied to me that he was about to embark on a relativist postmodern argument asserting that fiction is as real as history and all that claptrap. Instead, it is a cogent, intelligent, well argued piece that warrants close reading by historians and novelists alike, as well as by their fans.

Here is the section that most got me, the historian, thinking:

Where do the bona fide historians stand in all of this? Though the scholars of the American Historical Association probably think of the novelist who uses historical materials as a kind of undocumented worker slinking over the border at night, writers of narrative have a natural affiliation, whatever their calling.

The late French structuralist critic Roland Barthes, in an essay entitled “Historical Discourse,” concludes that the important stylistic trope of narrative history, namely the objective voice, “turns out to be a particular form of fiction.” Insofar as any piece of writing has a voice, the impersonal, objective voice of the narrative historian is his stock-in-trade. The presumption of factuality underlies the amassed documentation historians live by, and so we accept that voice. It is the voice of authority.

But to be conclusively objective is to have no cultural identity, to exist in such existential solitude as to have, in fact, no place in the world.

Historians research as many sources as they can, but they decide what is relevant to their enterprise and what isn’t. We should recognize the degree of creativity in this profession that goes beyond intelligent, assiduous scholarship. “There are no facts in themselves,” Nietzche says. “For a fact to exist we must first introduce meaning.” Historiography, like fiction, organizes its data in demonstration of meaning. The cultural matrix in which the historian works will condition his thinking; he will speak for his time and place by the facts he brings to light and the facts he leaves in darkness, the facts he brings into being and the facts that remain unformed, unborn. Recorded history undergoes a constant process of revision, and the process is not just a matter of discovering additional evidence to correct the record. “However remote in time events may seem to be, every historical judgment refers to present needs and situations,” the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce says in his book History as the Story of Liberty. This is why history has to be written and rewritten from one generation to another.

Nevertheless, we recognize the difference between good history and bad history, just as we can tell a good novel from a bad one.

The scholarly historian and the undocumented novelist make common cause as operatives of the Enlightenment. They are confronted with faux history as it is construed by power, as it is perverted for political purposes, as it is hammered into serviceable myth by those who take advantage of its plasticity. For “History,” of course, is not only an academic study. It is, at all times, in all places, hot. “Who controls the past controls the future,” Orwell says in 1984. So there is history as written by elected or nonelected political leaders, super-patriots, dirty tricksters, xenophobes, and all other exemplars of shrewdly reductive thinking; history as written by ideologically driven social theorists, textbook writers conforming their work to communal pressures, retired statesmen putting the best face on their lamentable accomplishments, and fervent acolytes of one religious cult or another.

The novelist is not alone in understanding that reality is amenable to any construction placed upon it.

The historian and the novelist both work to deconstruct the aggregate fictions of their societies. The scholarship of the historian does this incrementally, the novelist more abruptly, from his unforgivable (but exciting) transgressions, as he writes his way in and around and under the historian’s work, animating it with the words that turn into the flesh and blood of living, feeling people.

The consanguinity of historians and novelists may be indicated by recent efforts of distinguished historians who, feeling themselves constrained by their discipline, have taken to writing novels. One presidential biographer has discovered no other way to accomplish his task than by yielding to unattributable flights of fancy. We should not be surprised by these border crossings. Who among writers of any genre would not want to see into the unseen?

I could quibble with his assertion of the obvious -- that historians have to make decisions -- as an implication that we are thus involved in a comparable project with novelists. I certainly object to Doctorow's invocation of Barthes' nonsense about history as a type of fiction, mostly because such an argument is stupid and wrong. But I do like Doctorow's elegant discussion of the "consanguinity" between novelists and historians, of our "common cause," and how we are both "products of the Enlightenment." I will continue to privilege historians over novelists when it comes to the past because however much Colbertian "truthiness" a novel might have, it cannot match the truth that historians pursue. But Doctorow is undoubtedly correct in asserting that there is too much common ground for us not to be allies.