History, a Literary Artifact?

The Traveling Concept of Narrative in/on Historiographic

Discourse
Author(s): Julia Nitz
Source: Interdisciplinary Literary Studies , Vol. 15, No. 1 (2013), pp. 69-85
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/intelitestud.15.1.0069

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 • History, a Literary Artifact? The Traveling
Concept of Narrative in/on Historiographic
Discourse
julia nitz

the “mutual” relationship between history

and narrative

Ever since its ancient days, history (oral, written, or otherwise ­mediated)
has been traveling across and between the boundaries of fact-based
sciences and of (imaginary) literature. It seems quite telling that Herodotus
as well as Thucydides are considered founding fathers of occidental ­history.
Herodotus, born in Halicarnassus in the fifth century b.c., is most well
known for his monumental work The Histories, based on the wars between
the Greeks and the Persians (499–79 b.c.). In his attempt to report on
events and, especially, on the conflicts between warring nations, Herodotus
makes deliberate use of literary techniques, such as ring composition, psy-
chonarration, and direct speech. He not only describes events but also pro-
vides insight into the thoughts and feelings of historical agents. In addition,
he refrains from giving an authoritative account of past events and their
cause-effect relations. On the contrary, his narrative is interspersed with
hearsay, speculation, myths, and different versions of events contributed by
different eyewitnesses or involved parties. Herodotus leaves ample room for
the audience to form an opinion of its own. He frequently comments on his
sources and on his manner of presenting them: “Anyone can adopt which-
ever of these alternative stories he finds most plausible; in any case, I have
stated my own opinion”; “I will report views about this country shared by

interdisciplinary literary studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2013

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 70 julia nitz

other people as well as by the Egyptians. This will be supplemented as well

by what I personally saw” (2008, 2:147, 154).1
Simon Schama, one of the most popular contemporary British histori-
ans, is completely charmed by Herodotus’s manner of recording history and
offers this description: “His relish for gossip, his intuitive understanding of
the idiosyncrasies of climate and geography, his primitive ethnography, his
unabashed subjectivities, the winning mishmash of hearsay and record, real
and fantastic” (1989, 325).
In contrast to his immediate predecessor and fellow historian
­Herodotus, Thucydides (c. 460 b.c.–c. 395 b.c.), author of the History of
the Peloponnesian War, approached the art of writing history from a differ-
ent, what we would today call a more scientific angle. He took as his model
the new methodology of Hippocratic doctors, who had taken to recording
medical data (symptoms as well as treatments and their effects) in order to
be able to more accurately diagnose a complaint in the future (Southgate
2011, 133). Thucydides hoped that he could apply a similar method to history
and, by meticulously collecting historical data, deduce from them general
laws applicable to human nature and behavior. He thus established a tradi-
tion of authoritative historical/political realism based on the recording of
facts about contemporary political and military events taken, as Thucydides
claims, from unequivocal, eyewitness accounts (see Thucydides 1910, 1:23).
The two Greek historians from the fifth century b.c. illustrate well the
different traditions of Western history-writing coming to life in its ancient
cradle. On the one hand, there is fact-based history, considered a science
among others, such as medicine or arithmetic, and, on the other hand,
there is history as one of the humanities, open to interpretation and a vari-
ety of meanings, considered a form of literary/aesthetic art, such as poetry
or rhetoric. Both Herodotus and Thucydides wrote narrative accounts of
the past; that is, they use narrative discourse with a fabula and a plot line to
recount what happened. In fact, their narrative practices aren’t altogether
that different from one another. Both try to create a lively and detailed pic-
ture of events, and both use narrative devices borrowed from literary arts.
Even though Thucydides claims to record only well-established fact, he
also provides insight into historical agents’ perspectives, expectations, and
motives, a technique that Grethlein describes as “side-shadowing” (2010,
323), a term coined by Gary Saul Morson in Narrative and Freedom (1994).
“Side-shadowing” is used to (re)create the “presentness” of the past, that is,
a kind of in actu atmosphere, in which we, for example, directly witness a
character ponder an issue or look with him or her down a mountaintop.2

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 history, a literary artifact? 71

The difference in Herodotus’s and Thucydides’s accounts is one less of

­narrative presentation than of narrative conception, expressed on the
level of metacommentary. While Herodotus openly acknowledges includ-
ing hearsay, unreliable accounts, and colorful tales, Thucydides doesn’t
comment on his sources or on different contesting versions of the same
story. The difference between the two historians is in their attitudes toward
the nature of history. For Thucydides it is foremost a fact-based empiri-
cal science that results in authoritative “true” accounts, and for Herodotus
it seems to be much more fluid and open to contestation and revision—a
narrative-construction.
The example of Herodotus and Thucydides demonstrates the two levels
on which the concept of narrative figures in the realm of history writing:
On the one hand, storytelling is part of historical practice, that is, the actual
creation of historical accounts.3 On the other, it is an aspect of the concept of
what history is and according to which rules it functions. As we saw in the
case of Thucydides, his ideal of a fact-based history didn’t deter him from
using narrative devices usually reserved for literature. Theory and practice
do not always go hand in hand; they may influence each other, however.
In this article, I would like to briefly chart the reciprocal and changing
relationship between history and its narrative realization. I shall explore
this liaison on the level of theoretical discussions on the form and function
of history, as well as on the level of the practice of history writing. After a
short historical survey, I concentrate on the narrative and cognitive turns
of the twentieth century and discuss their impact on history writing and
historiographic studies. Finally, I shall explore current trends in history and
historiography and suggest an agenda for the future study of the process of
narrating the past.

the “turns” in the relationship between history and

narrative: a historical survey

The “Realist” and the “Subjective” Turns

The strongly manifested historical realism of the nineteenth century should

not blur the fact that until the middle of the eighteenth century history writ-
ing was mainly categorized as an art form, namely, as an interpretation and a
(re)construction of past events. Renaissance Europe regarded history as lit-
erary art and the historian as a writer artist (Canary and Kozicki 1978, 3–4).

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 72 julia nitz

For centuries, the distinction between history and ­literature was practically
nonexistent. A writer of history simply differentiated between fictional or
historical narrative instead. At the onset of the eighteenth century, histori-
ans concentrated primarily on the accuracy and truth-value of their rep-
resentations, while still organizing their narratives in structures typical
of fictional narratives. Voltaire, for example, describes the act of writing
history as a creative process: “History, like tragedy, requires an exposition,
a central action and a denouement. . . . I have tried to move my reader,
even in history” (letter from August 1, 1752, no. 4163, in Besterman 1965).
Authors like Voltaire understood history as a modern successor of the epic
genre. All in all, historiography and historical practice in the eighteenth
century are marked by a clear distinction between what is narrated and
the act of narrating it (i.e., histoire and discours). Historical presentation
is not understood as an objective re-creation of the past; characteristic of
eighteenth-century historical discourse is a discussion of the legitimacy of
each individual interpretation of past events.
Already in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, philosophers
such as René Descartes (1596–1650) insisted that in order to study an object,
one needs to distance oneself from it. Furthermore, scientists developed
new paradigms for research, such as the fixed coordinates of space and time
introduced by Isaac Newton (1643–1727). These new scientific methods
came to influence historiography significantly only in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Beverley Southgate describes this new “scien-
tific” approach to history very poignantly: “History was to be emphatically
defined by reference to science—this time, to a science that blended the
mechanistic explanations of the Newtonian universe, within its reassuring
framework of absolute space and time, with the narrative convictions of
Darwinian evolution, which promoted the welcome trajectory of progress”
(2011, 135).
Southgate argues that with the widespread interest in, and increasing
development of, natural sciences, and, especially, through the impact of
Darwinian theory, history was transformed into a “science” in its own right.
It was in this spirit that one of the founders of the English Historical Review,
Mandell Creighton, pronounced his agenda to pursue history “for its own
sake in a calm and scientific spirit” (1886, 5).
At the end of the neoclassicist period, the long-established “marriage”
of literature and history started to crumble. The result was a split into
two separate disciplines: history writing was declared an empiric science
whose object of research was the real historical past, and poetry/literature

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 history, a literary artifact? 73

(and as such historical fiction) was positioned within the realm of the
imaginary nonscientific. By the end of the 1700s, the eighteenth-century
distinction between object and subject, past and present, the narrated and
narrative discourse began to disappear. Overt narrator-historians gave way
to covert authorial narrators. Historical texts were no longer regarded pri-
marily as disputable models but were seen as objectified facts (Gossman
1978, 5–6). Of course, some thinkers denied any separation between history
and literature. Most famously, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and his friend
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) questioned the possibility of an objective
history based on fixed constituents of time and space (see Carlyle 1836).
Further evidence of a denial of a clear-cut distinction between history and
literature is the flourishing genre of historical fiction, most notably the
works of Sir Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe, today considered one of the
landmarks of nineteenth-century literature. Again, we see a discrepancy
between theory and literary practice.
Already by the end of the nineteenth century, English philosophers
such as Francis Herbert Bradley had begun increasingly to challenge the
possibility of “objective” history (1874). They established the today widely
accepted wisdom that a historian’s ideology determines his or her view and
interpretation of past events and, thus, his or her representation of them.
By the mid-twentieth century, the existence of objective historical facts was
strongly contested, and it was assumed not that the historian was involved
in a process of subjectively but logically arranging “real” facts but that he or
she generated or created these facts. The English historian and philosopher
Robin George Collingwood calls this process “imaginative construction,”
which he defines as “something far more solid and powerful than we have
hitherto realized. So far from relying for its validity upon the support of
given facts, it actually serves as the touchstone by which we decide whether
alleged facts are genuine” (1946, 243–44). History was now regarded as the
product of the individual historian or of a group of historians at a specific
point in time in a particular place. E. H. Carr subsumed the consequences
of this perspective for the study of history in What Is History as “Before you
study the history, study the historian” (1961, 54).
Interestingly, in the early twentieth century, when criticism against
“objective” or “objectified” history was strong, the Annales School of his-
torians initiated so-called social science history. Scholars of the Annales
School collected vast amounts of data and concentrated their research
on the collective, on multiple causes of historical developments, and less
on individual historical agents. So, in the early twentieth century, at a point

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 74 julia nitz

in time when historiographic theory and philosophy actually free history of

its claim for objective truths, historians distance themselves from literary
methods, turning instead to quantitative data to validate their work.

The “Narrative” Turn

The “subjective turn” in the philosophy of history, as we may term it, gave
way to the “narrative turn” in the 1960s. Roland Barthes, with his essay
“Le discourse de l’histoire” (1967), was one of the first theorists to focus
attention on the narrative makeup of history and to demand that we study
its form rather than its content or its relation to the “real.” Barthes basically
assumes that historical narration does not differ from any other form of
literary narration. Hayden White famously adopts this idea in Metahistory
(1973), in which he asserts: “In this theory I treat historical work as what
it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose
discourse. Histories (and philosophies of history as well) combine a certain
amount of ‘data,’ theoretical concepts for ‘explaining’ these data, and a nar-
rative structure for their presentation as an icon of sets of events presumed
to have occurred in times past. In addition, I maintain, they contain a deep
structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in
nature” (ix).
This quotation combines all basic assumptions of White’s theory. He
regards historical text as verbal construct, as a human-created linguistic
artifact in the form of prose discourse. In contrast to Mink, for example,
White doesn’t believe that history exists in the form of stories with a begin-
ning, a middle, and an immanent ending (teleological structure); he argues
that historians of the Occident chose narrative as a mode of (re)telling the
past and thus “transformed narrativity from a manner of speaking into a
paradigm of the form that reality itself displays” (1987, 24). White regards
history as “interpretation of whatever information about and knowledge of
the past the historians command” (1999, 3). In his theory, White concen-
trates on the deep structure of historical discourse, namely, on the poetic
and linguistic principles that determine a historian’s interpretation of the
past—his or her selection, arrangement, and explanation of historical data.
According to White, the linguistically determined perception of the world is
limited by tropological criteria (1991, 3). In organizing their historical data,
historians can gain access to only specific figurative tropological structures
that guide their interpretative strategies. White differentiates between four
basic types of tropological structures: metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche,

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 history, a literary artifact? 75

and irony. When a historian, for example, uses synecdoche, the presented
historical processes function as paradigm for overarching holistic historical
worlds (microcosm-macrocosm-ideology).
The tropological positioning is followed by what White calls the act of
“emplotment,” that is, “the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle
as components of specific kinds of plot-structures” (1978, 48). Emplotment
is the process by which historians encode and synthesize historical data into
a coherent narrative/story. The reader then makes sense of the (hi)story by
decoding the plot structure or the plot type (tragedy, comedy, etc.); this is
to say, “the events are rendered comprehensible by being subsumed under
the categories of the plot-structure in which they are encoded as a story of
a particular kind” (49). The historian as well as his or her audience takes
his or her plot structures from conventional fictional literature. White talks
directly of narrative structures that are conventionally used to attach cul-
turally sanctified meanings to everyday experiences. As a consequence of
his theorizing, White regards it as unequivocally necessary to treat history
as we treat novels and to research its discursive structures.
White’s formalistic reading of history strongly influenced postmod-
ern historiography. It was less his theory of the tropologically and linguis-
tically determined nature of historical logic than his treatment of history
as verbal construct that had a lasting effect. After White, it was no longer
possible to ignore the narrative nature of history and to view the narra-
tive makeup of history as attire that can conveniently be taken off to get
at the bare facts. Historians and literary scholars started to closely ana-
lyze the narrative structure of history texts. Gossman (1990) and Gearhart
(1984) studied eighteenth-century historiographic narratives; Bann (1984),
Süssmann (2000), and Rigney (1990, 2001) looked at narrative history of the
nineteenth century; and Carrard (1992) and Berkhofer (1997) concentrated
on twentieth-century history. However, most of these studies remained
rather sketchy, concentrating mainly on one narrative criterion. Carrard,
for example, analyses works of New Historicism with the help of Genette’s
logical schemata of the onomastic identity of author and narrator, claim-
ing that in historical narrative the author is also the narrator. Carrard was
able to prove that in contrast to their set objective agenda, New Historians
made deliberate use of first-person narration, thus violating the axiom
author = narrator of historical discourse.
An important legacy of White’s theory was that the study of ­history
writing was increasingly taken up by literary scholars in general and
narratologists in particular. During the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s,

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 76 julia nitz

most historiographers and narratologists studying history texts applied

­structuralist narratological methods, as introduced by Franz K. Stanzel,
Gérard Genette, and Mieke Bal for fictional narratives. The most commonly
examined narrative criteria were those of voice, perspective, and emplot-
ment.4 In general, the idea was that on the discourse level history works the
same way as fictional narrative and can be analyzed by similar methods.
Nonetheless, on the content level, or rather on the level of reference, his-
tory and fiction were not necessarily equated. Robert Holton nicely pins
down the attitude of most scholars in the 1980s and (early) 1990s toward the
fact/fiction demarcation: “While fiction and history ought by no means to
be conflated, the similarity of the mediating roles played by concepts such
as intentionality and point of view in the discussion of the writing both of
history as narrative and of narrative fiction tends to work against the abso-
lute separation of these two genres. Generic differences certainly exist, yet
inasmuch as both seek to construct coherent narrative representations of
events the similarity is worth examining” (1994, 11).
Holton emphasizes that history and fiction are two different genre types
that use the same discourse strategies. As a consequence, the same methods
of discourse analysis are applicable.
As a result of the narrative turn in historiography, the historical
­profession experienced what Richard J. Evans characterized as a “deep cri-
sis.” Historians had to face the common understanding that what they “wrote
was their own invention and not a true or objective representation of past
reality, which was in essence irrecoverable” (2002, 7). Interestingly, the crisis
didn’t lead to a breakdown in the discipline but, on the contrary, to quite a
self-confident reemergence. For several sociocultural reasons, the 1990s wit-
nessed an unprecedented interest in history.5 The genre of popular history
flourished in all its guises: monuments, historical film, TV documentaries,
exhibitions on historical periods and personages, popular history books, the
faction genre, TV history shows, historical drama, and historical fiction.6 In
contrast to the earlier practice of presenting historical accounts in a detached
authoritative third-person narrative style, historians and presenters of
history shows and history programs now turned to announcing emphatically
that the audience was going to be presented with their personal reading and
interpretation of past events, albeit based on thorough research and expert
insight. As Evans points out, the fact that historians were now largely treated
as novelists created a cultural climate in which historians could adopt a
highly personalized style without sacrificing their claim to represent the past
as expertly and accurately as possible (15). Evans argues that since there was

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 history, a literary artifact? 77

no “correct” or “true” version of the past attainable, and there was nothing
but subjective readings of the past, historians were now free to present their
individual “truths” and act as emancipated authoritative experts.
As it is, the (structuralist) narrative turn didn’t lead to more carefully
presented history full of conjectural and inferential operators, such as
­possibly, most likely, and so on, and to accounts that offered different ver-
sions open to argument. Instead, it generated highly authoritative presenta-
tions that were introduced as the achievements of a particular historian’s
research and his or her understanding of past events. Particularly, popular
historians freely use narrative techniques typical of novels or fiction film,
such as interior focalization (direct point of view of a historical agent), psy-
chonarration, and narrated monologue (direct insight into the thoughts
and feelings of historical personages). In addition, they don’t comment on
such highly fictionalized methods, outing them as deliberate speculation.
In a BBC Timewatch documentary about Great Britain’s George III
(reigned 1760–1820), “How Mad Was King George?” (2004), for example, one
of the experts, Susan Groom, commenting on George III’s mourning for his
little son Alfred, adopts a first-person voice in relating his feelings: “I am very
sorry about Alfred. But had it been Octavius . . . I would have died too.” In a
reenacted scene, we then hear sounds of weeping and gaze at children’s cloth-
ing spread on the ground. The documentary directly presents George III’s
feelings without any mention of sources or hints about the degree of conjec-
ture in this reading. Such fictionalized representations of consciousness are
not limited to TV shows but are also frequently found in other forms of pop-
ular and academic history writing. However, in the latter, we find more fre-
quently the technique of psychonarration, used in the manner of Herodotus
and Thucydides, rather than that of interior monologue.7 In short, history
of the past thirty years is to a great degree characterized by self-conscious
historian-narrators who present authoritative, teleological narratives and who
freely incorporate discourse strategies borrowed from imaginary literature.

The “Cognitive” Turn

While the “narrative turn” “emancipated” historians into self-confident

author-narrators, narratologists and historiographers were trying to find
the right means of defining and analyzing historical discourse. As early as
1990, Dorrit Cohn called for a modal system of historical discourse analo-
gous to typologies of fictional narrative (1990). Until today, no ­satisfactory
modal system for historiographic discourse has been established, but

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 78 julia nitz

several scholars took up Cohn’s challenge. Vera and Ansgar Nünning treat
history as a genre in its own right and suggest working on a typology for
historiographic discourse (2002, 18). Daniel Fulda, for example, aims at a
cognitive narratology of history writing (2005, 173–94), and Stephan Jaeger
suggests a context-oriented narratology, anchored within cultural studies
(2002, 260). All these narratological inquiries into historiographic dis-
course of the late 1990s and early 2000s observe that history writing is a
cross-medial ­phenomenon. Quite often, narratologists use exhibitions
(e.g., Fulda 2005) and documentaries (e.g., Jaeger 2002) as case studies to
underpin their argument. Scholars increasingly begin to turn away from
classical structuralist narratology and look for alternatives that seem more
adequate to the study of historiographic narratives, realized in a variety of
media, than structuralist criteria geared toward written discourse. This ten-
dency is true for the study of narrative discourse in general and is part of
the so-called cognitive turn within narrative studies.
One of the first narratologists to introduce narrative as a cross-medial
“text type” was Seymour Chatman (see Chatman 1990, 114). He belongs to
the structuralist school that binds the concept of narrative to the existence of
a fabula/story that can be realized via different discursive forms and, hence,
in a variety of media formats. Cognitive narratologists (e.g, David Herman,
Monika Fludernik, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Werner Wolf)
anchor the concept of narrative in its function, for example, of opening up
possible worlds (Ryan 2004; Doležel 2010), of evoking real-world experi-
ences (Fludernik 1996), or of “providing human beings with one of their
primary resources for organizing and comprehending experience” (Herman
2001, 130–31). Most important, cognitive narratologists understand narra-
tive meaning creation as a process that combines the production and recep-
tion of texts (see Herman 2003). Hence, in historiographic narratology the
question was no longer limited to how historians create what kind of history,
but how audiences make sense of these texts (see Lippert 2009, 2010).
Cognitive narratologists agree neither on the functional nature of nar-
rative nor on the position of history within the cognitive concept of narra-
tive. Some narratologists, such as Monika Fludernik, more or less exclude
“history proper” from the macro-genre narrative on the grounds that
its function is to provide an argument and not to retrospectively reflect
on the experiences of past agents.8 Others (e.g., Alun Munslow, Keith
Jenkins, Robert A. Rosenstone, Beverley Southgate) took the “postmodern
­challenge” to historiography, as Doležel terms it, to the extreme, radicaliz-
ing Hayden White’s postulate of emplotment = literary operation = fiction

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 history, a literary artifact? 79

making into history = fiction, and thus into the dogma: “Historiography
does not re-present the past; it creates it” (Doležel 2007, 49). The idea was
that if narratives produce possible worlds, that is, versions of as-if worlds
(fiction) and “real worlds” (history), and if the means (narrative strategies)
of producing them and hence the cognitive strategies of decoding them are
identical, then there is no longer the need to postulate a difference.
Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow in their highly acclaimed book, The
Nature of History Reader, explain that history is first and foremost a lit-
erary undertaking and not, as historians have long held, a science based
on empirical method (2004, 1). Doležel emphasizes further that audiences,
“(inspired by) popular appropriations of historical fiction,” often mistake
historical fiction for historical presentation (2007, 181). As a consequence,
historiographer-narratologists such as Jenkins, Munslow, Southgate, and
Rosenstone call on historians to change their attitude towards their work
and their modes of presenting the past (see Jenkins and Munslow 2004;
Munslow 2011; Southgate 2011; Rosenstone 2004).9 Instead of using the sup-
posed equation of history = fiction in order to freely integrate fictional narra-
tive strategies in highly authoritative, stringent, and teleologically organized
accounts of the past, thereby still treating history writing as science that
purports to tell some truth about the past, scholars demand that histori-
ans openly comment on their production process and that they include or
invite contesting accounts. They are arguing that since historical worlds are
created via the same means as fictional possible worlds, historians, instead
of imitating authorial narrators of nineteenth-century realist fiction, should
start to learn from postmodern writers and create (hi)stories that are fluid,
multifaceted, and open to contestation (e.g., Rosenstone 2004, 4).
Studies on experimental postmodern history by Robert F. Berkhofer
(1997), Keith Jenkins (1997), Munslow and Rosenstone (2004), Doležel
(2007, 2010), and Stephan Jaeger (2011) have revealed that some among
the multitude of historiographic works successfully adopt methods of
­twentieth-century literature without tipping the balance towards fictional-
possible worlds instead of historically possible worlds. One of the most often
cited early examples is Simon Schama’s Citizens, a narrative history of the
French Revolution. In his introduction to the volume, Schama announces
his approach thus: “What follows (I need hardly say) is not science. It has
no pretensions to dispassion. Though in no sense fiction (for there is no
­deliberate invention), it may well strike the reader as story rather than
­history. It is an exercise in animated description, a negotiation with a two-
hundred-year memory without any pretence of definitive closure” (1989, 6).

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 80 julia nitz

Schama doesn’t purport to present an objective, nonjudgmental grand

narrative of the French Revolution. He clearly states that he uses the two-
hundred-year record available to present a particular version that remains
open to contestation. Doležel closely studied Schama’s Citizens and illustrates
how, by using different strands of personal stories based on meticulously col-
lected evidence (provided in notes), Schama creates a nonfiction story. One
gets the impression that a “cast performs the drama of the Revolution,” creat-
ing a “multifaceted flow with many individual centers” (Doležel 2007, 55). Just
like any other history text, Citizens is full of gaps that are filled by conjecture.
But Schama scrupulously notes the gaps in documentation and makes fre-
quent use of probability operators, such as undoubtedly, possibly, or perhaps
to mark conjectures (Doležel 2007, 54). What emerges is a well-documented
mosaic of personal and collective experience during the French Revolution.
Stephan Jaeger in his recent article “Poietic Worlds and Experientiality
in Historiographic Narrative” (2011) discusses different examples of post-
modern history writing, ranging from Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years:
Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914 (2008), to Karl Schlögel’s Terror
und Traum: Moskau 1937 (2008), and from Michael Kloft’s Spiegel TV
documentary Feuerstorm to a permanent exhibition called Kraków Under
Nazi Occupation, 1939–1945 in Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory (opened
in 2010). Jaeger vividly shows how these works create, for example, multiple
temporal layers, memory mosaics, and memory spaces in order to allow the
audience to (re)experience the past.
To summarize the current trends in narrative history writing and histo-
riographic narratology: the past thirty years witnessed, along with a prolific
output of history writing along the lines of nineteenth-century (fictional)
realism, the emergence of a body of history that adopts narrative devices
typical of (modern) and twentieth-century literature, presenting a possi-
ble past based on meticulously documented evidence. Historiography, in
turn, welcomes such open and multifaceted histories and sets itself the task
to inquire into and work toward a typology of historically possible worlds
(e.g., Doležel 2007, 32; Jaeger 2011).

conclusion: a turn toward the audience

This survey of the reciprocal relationship of history and narrative and of

­history writing and historiographic scholarship has shown that narrative
has remained the dominant mode of (re)presenting the past, while the

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 history, a literary artifact? 81

concept of narrative and the narrative techniques used to portray past events
and experiences have been modified over time. Until the late eighteenth
century, history writing belonged to the realm of literature. Authors freely
used fictional narrative devices to create their individual accounts of the
past. With changing attitudes toward reality and the way to “capture” it,
history was transferred to the field of objective sciences in the nineteenth
century, marked by a distanced authorial voice, claiming to represent
empirically sanctified fact, only to be catapulted back into the sphere of
the “imaginary” at the beginning of the twentieth century. Again histori-
ans stressed their work as a subjective form of interpretation, based, how-
ever, on scientific research and empirical methods. With the structuralist
turn in the 1970s that equated history with fiction on the discourse level,
the historical profession experienced a deep crisis that was soon overcome
and that inspired highly authoritative, teleological accounts of the past,
with (popular) historians making free use of fictional narrative devices.
The cognitive turn and postmodern historiography increasingly started
to challenge historians who failed to understand their work as narrative
creation, who declined to open their presentations to contestation, and
who didn’t comment on the creation process. The postmodern period also
witnessed the emergence of historiographic works that adopted methods
of ­twentieth-century ­literature and created possible historical worlds that
allowed audiences to (re)experience the past.
“Experience” and “experientiality” are concepts of increasing impor-
tance to an understanding of the function of narrative. Experientiality
denotes the characteristic of a text to retrospectively evoke past experiences
(as for example in a first-person reminiscence of a particular event) or to
allow the audience to (re)experience an episode, for example, by guiding
its gaze with a camera down the precipice on which a suicidal character
is standing.10 While early studies denied the existence of experientiality in
historiographic texts, new inquiries stress the importance of experience for
historiographic narratives, since, as they argue, one of its main functions is
to (re)create what it was like to live in a certain place at a certain time (Jaeger
2011; Meretoja 2011). As I stated earlier, one of the main innovations of the
cognitive approach to narrative was the insight that the process of narra-
tive sense-making was situated on two levels: production and reception.
Applied to the concept of experience this meant that on the one hand, it is
part of the production process that tries to (re)create experiences, as well as
part of the reception process, in which the audience (re)lives experiences
or experiences the past as such, as for example, in a particularly designed

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 82 julia nitz

museum space. In the quotation above from Schama’s Citizens, the author
stresses that the audience might read the account as story rather than as
history, clearly indicating that the process of decodation by the audience is
of vital importance (6). Additionally, Doležel’s warning that audiences often
mistake historical fiction for history (2007, 181) points at the significance
of “readerly” meaning-making in the construction of cultural memory. It
seems as if historians as well as (cognitive) narratologists are aware of the
role of the recipient in the process of narratively making sense of the past.
Theoretical narrative models, such as the one I developed for historio(bio)
graphical works (Lippert 2010) often include the process of encodation and
decodation, but as it is, such models are primarily based on theoretical con-
jectures of a (usually well-educated and media-experienced) model “reader.”
Just as postmodern historiographers demand of historians that they
deal more professionally with conjectures, I suggest that historiographic
narratologists and cultural analysts need to broach the issue of how audi-
ences make sense of historiographic accounts and the different narrative
techniques they use empirically in order to be able to explain and to under-
stand how (H)istory is created in postmodern society.

notes

1. For more examples of Herodotus’s function as an author-narrator, see Frangakis

2011.
2. For the concept of “side-shadowing” in history, see Morson 1994; Grethlein
2010.
3. When I refer to historical accounts or historical writing in this article, I mean
to denote works of history and not “old” primary documents.
4. The studies listed in the paragraph above all deal with structuralist narratologi-
cal criteria.
5. Evans explains this unprecedented turn toward the past and its all-pervading
presence within the media by a general disruption of identity as a result of
major geopolitical changes (e.g., the end of the Cold War): “At a time when
other sources of identity such as class and region have declined, history is step-
ping in to fill the gap” (2002, 12).
6. For a description of the popular “faction genre” (or “narrative nonfiction”)
that combines fact and fiction, such as Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats (1994), see
Lowenthal 1985, 229; and Mandler 2002, 137.
7. For more examples of psychonarration and other devices borrowed from fic-
tion in academic history writing of the 1990s and early 2000s, see Lippert 2009,
273–82.

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 history, a literary artifact? 83

8. Fludernik repeated and refined her argument on the nonexperiential quality

of history in her article “Experience, Experientiality and Historical Narrative:
A View from Narratology” (2010).
9. As a consequence of the narrative and the cognitive turns, a variety of dis-
ciplines adopted narratological methods for their fields of research. Alun
­Munslow’s academic career as historian and historiographer is symptomatic of
these developments. He focuses his research primarily, if not exclusively, on the
narrative makeup of history writing.
10. The concept of “experientiality” as the functional characteristic of narrative was
first introduced by Monika Fludernik (1996).

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