Try theses darcho:
Deconstructing History
by Dr Alun Munslow
http://www.history.ac.uk/eseminars/sem5.html
Book review: An Engagement with Postmodern Foes, Literary Theorists and Friends on the Borders with History
Reviewer: Professor Patrick Karl O'Brien
Professor Emeritus of the University of London
http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/obrien.html
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987.
"This relation [between narrative discourse and historical representation] becomes a problem for historical theory with the realization that narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real events in their aspect as developmental processes but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications. Many modern historians hold that narrative discourse, far from being a neutral medium for the representation of historical events and processes, is the very stuff of a mythical view of reality, a conceptual or pseudoconceptual “content” which , when used to represent real events, endows them with an illusory coherence and charges them with the kinds of meanings more characteristics of oneiric than of waking thoughts.
This critique of narrative discourse by recent proponents of scientific historiography is of a piece with the rejection of narrativity in literary modernism and with the perception, general in our time, that real life can never be truthfully represented as having the kind of formal coherency met with in the conventional, well-made or fabulistic story. Since its invention by Herodotus, traditional historiography has featured predominantly the belief that history itself consists of a congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of the historians is to uncover these stories and to retell them in a narrative, the truth of which would reside in the correspondence of the story lived by real people in the past. Thus conceived, the literary aspect of the historical narrative was supposed to inhere solely in certain stylistic embellishments that rendered the account vivid and interesting to the reader rather than in the kind of poetic inventiveness presumed to be characteristic of the writer of fictional narratives.
According to this view, it was possible to believe that whereas writers of fiction invented everything in their narratives–characters, events, plots, motifs, themes, atmosphere and so on—historians invented nothing but certain rhetorical flourishes or poetic effects to the end of engaging the reader’s attention and sustaining their interest in the true story they had to tell. Recent theories of discourse, however, dissolve the distinction between realistic and fictional discourses based on the presumption of an ontological difference between their respective referents, real or imaginary, in favor of stressing their common aspect as semiological apparatuses that produce meaning by the systematic substitution of signifieds (conceptual contents) for the extradiscursive entities that serve as their referents.
I do not offer these reflections on the relation between historiography and narrative as aspiring to anything other than an attempt to illuminate the distinction between story elements and plot elements in the historical discourse. Common opinion has it that the plot of a narrative imposes a meaning on the events that make up its story level my revealing at the end a structure that was imminent in the events all along. What I’m trying to establish is the nature of this immanence in any narrative account of real events, events that are offered as the proper content of historical discourse. These events are real not because they occurred , but because, first, they were remembered, and, second, they are capable of finding a place in a chronologically ordered sequence. In order, however, for an account of them to be considered a historical account, it is not enough that they be recorded in the order of their original occurrence. It is the fact that they can be recorded otherwise, in an order of narrative, that makes them, at one and the same time, questionable as to their authenticity and susceptible to being considered tokens of reality. In order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to tale upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows this reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.
The history, then, belongs to the category of what might be called “the discourse of the real,” as against the “discourse of the imaginary” of “the discourse of desire.” The formulation is Lacanian, obviously, but I do not wish to push its Lacanian aspects too far. I merely wish to suggest that we can comprehend the appeal of historical discourse by recognizing the extent to which it makes the real desirable, makes the real into an object of desire, and does so by its imposition, upon events that are represented as real, of the formal coherency that stories possess. Unlike that of the annals, the reality represented in the historical narrative, in “speaking itself,” speaks to us, summons us from afar to which we ourselves aspire. The historical narrative, as against the chronicle, reveals to us a world that is putatively “finished,” done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not falling apart. In this world, reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience. Insofar as historical stories can be completed, can be given narrative closure, can be shown to have had a plot all along, they give to reality the odor of the ideal. This is why the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as “found” in the events rather than put there by narrative techniques." (20-1)
"The production of meaning in this case can be regarded as a performance, because any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different kinds of stories. Since no given set or sequence of events is intrinsically tragic, comic, farcical, and so on, but can be constructed as such only by the imposition of the structure of a given story type on the events, it is the choice of the story type and its imposition upon the events that endow them with meaning. The effect of such emplotment may be regarded as an explanation, but it would have to be recognized that the generalization that serve the function of universals in any version of a nomological-deductive argument are the topoi of literary plots, rather than he causal laws of science.
This is why a narrative history can legitimately by regarded as something other than a scientific account of the events of which it speaks—as the Annalists have rightly argued. But it is not sufficient reason to deny to narrative history substantial truth value. Narrative historiography may very well, as Furet indicates, “dramatize” historical events and “novelize” historical processes, but this only indicates that the truths in which narrative history deals are of an order different from those of its social scientific counterpart. [...]
The relationship between historiography and literature is, of course, as tenuous and difficult to define as that between historiography and science. In part, no doubt, this is because historiography in the West arises against the background of a distinctively literary (or fictional) discourse which itself took shape against the even more archaic discourse of myth." (44)
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/dbremm/historiographic metafiction.htm
