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Book Review
| Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction?, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2006. pp. viii + 296. $39.95 paper.
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| Where was this book when I was an Honours student and the twin spectres of post-modernism and post-structuralism seemed to menace historians with being fragmented and pluralised, or deconstructed, beyond relevance? Under the pall of the 'posts', decisions about what/how/why to research and write history were almost immobilizing. Here is an antidote for 'epistemological vertigo' (p. 5). Is History Fiction? shows that — in terms of Hegel's model of thesis/antithesis/synthesis — History is reaching a synthesis of traditional and post-modernist/poststructuralist ways of presenting the past. |
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If the question 'is history fiction?' was rephrased as 'if history uses the fictive arts does that make it as factual as a novel?' the answer, according to Ann Curthoys and John Docker would be 'no'. But, as they point out, the question is more sophisticated than that; it extends to
can historians tell the truth about the past? Should history be written from the present or for its own sake? Is it possible to see the past in its own terms? Should we make moral judgements about people and actions in the past? Are histories shaped by narrative conventions, so that their meaning derives from their form rather than the past itself? (p. 3)
and it requires a book-length reply. As historians, the authors (although Docker is also a literary and cultural critic), answer these questions historiographically, employing the device of a tightly constructed framing narrative as rhetorical scaffolding. The form and substance of the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides are used as a way of linking implicit classical thinking on historical practice with key works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. |
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Chapters one and two establish the dichotomy between Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus is portrayed as the proto-postmodernist; as having used such trademark developments of non-traditional history as trans-nationalism and the inclusion of women. By contrast, Thucydides' ideological and methodological approach is linked with the iconic positivist Leopold van Ranke, famously invoked as the father of attempts at non-subjective or scientific historical practice. At the heart of the book is the idea that non-traditional history can't be all that bad if it was practiced by Herodotus, the 'father of history'. |
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Chapter three examines the finer points of Ranke's development as an historian, including his eventual acceptance of the connection between historical novels and readers' interest in the past. In chapter four, 'History, Science and Art', Curthoys and Docker reject the myth of a post-Rankean consensus on the value of attempting a scientific approach to History; chapters five and six, 'Has History any Meaning?' and 'History in the Light of Catastrophe' deal with debates about whether there is an intrinsic truth in historical facts, and further dismantle the myth of consensus on 'scientific', nationalistic, progressive (Thucydidean) history. |
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By the 1960s, the 'automatic conjunction of history as "scientific" and "objective"' had fallen apart (p. 136), and chapter seven, 'The Linguistic Turn' deals with the emerging incorporation of social scientific research methods along with interpretative approaches based on what was both present and absent in language and other formations of meaning in historical sources. Perhaps because of the Anglo-American focus of the book (and likely space restrictions), the lack of mention of Australian work is most noticeable in this section. |
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At first reading chapter eight, 'The Feminist Challenge' seems to be a cut-and-paste history of western feminism, also with little reference to the Australian context. Interestingly, though, by using a constant, measured and descriptive tone here, as throughout the book, the authors seem to be implying that even the most outrageous historical anomalies are best dealt with even-handedly. Besides: Herodotus was inclusive of women; Thucydides/Ranke exclusively male-centred. |
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From women's history the discussion moves to key examples of late twentieth century thinking on both the form and substance of history writing. Chapter nine, 'Postmodernism and Post-structuralism', explores the de-centring effect of discourse analysis and the anti-western prisms of post-colonialism. The potential amorality of this de-centring are explored, and rejected, in chapter ten, 'Anti-Postmodernism and the Holocaust'. Chapter 11 is a summary of three contemporary examples of the enormous tension between post-modern history writing and the resulting destabilisation perceived by public participants in specific historical events. The fundamental questions in the second half of the book are: whose history is being written; whose truth? |
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In the end Is History Fiction? gives a very accessible, coherent account of some difficult and often unconnected material. Curthoys and Docker are refreshingly confident that history does not lose its claim to truth-telling while at the same time using self-reflexive, literary techniques, and since historians have to look to the past not only for the raw material but for professional modelling, Is History Fiction? serves as an excellent guidebook. |
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| University of Sydney |
JULIE MCINTYRE | |
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