MODL 5304 Postings

“I am a historian, for I can trace a complete picture from individual extant data, and I know where parts are missing and how to complement them.” –Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831)I thought this quote, found in our Enlightenment article, was both bold and yet revealing of the truth about history.  I do not use the words “truth” and “history” in the same sentence lightly for it reminds me of the work by Joyce Oldham Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob entitled Telling the Truth About History (1994) in which, similar to Hayden White’s article, the objectivity of history is challenged, and specifically for what we are talking about this week in class the positivism of the Enlightenment historians.  They argue some good points, but in a sense they destroy more than they build.  They attempt to leave the reader in doubt of not only religious, but also scientific understanding.  In the end all they offer is relativism, which of course is in vogue in many circles, but I see as destructive.  Hayden White’s “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” attempts to reduce history to fiction by arguing that “the manner of making sense of it is the same” (98).  In other words the means, which is using a narrative style, using metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, etc., in the writing of history necessarily makes it fiction.  In Keith Windshuttle’s book The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past a defense is made in the name of traditional history.  One of Windshuttle’s targets is White whose arguments he contends are incoherent.  In response to White, Windshuttle basically argues that if the historian performs a “poetic act” in choosing a framework, which is mutually exclusive – for White acts as if the definability of the four tropes is powerful and determinative – than how can historians overlap, merge, and create dual existences of tropes in their writing?  Historians are not so confined as White contends.  They are free to choose a variety of stylistic devices in the construction of history, but they embellish and explain rather than predetermine its outcome.  Niebuhr’s quote is bold in the sense that he claims to not only be able to put together the puzzle pieces of history, which are often complex or missing, but also to complement them in such a way that they flow together.  Between the two I feel that Niebuhr is more balanced than White in that both admit that history is constructed, but Niebuhr struggles to find what truths can be brought forth, whereas White denies its existence.  My question to White would be if everything is a fiction, than what truth are we to take away from his arguments?  I am not trying to demean everything White argues because he makes some good insights on which historians should reflect.  However, fully accepting his arguments that history is fiction and that its origins are in the “literary imagination” (99) leads to the denial of any kind of truth and undercuts who we are as human beings, for in the end that is what history is about.