Stones in the Quarry: George Cable's Strange True Stories of Louisiana
1999; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
Resumocareer of George Cable, southern historiographer and writer of fiction, illustrates vivid fashion just how fluid the boundaries separating literary and historical discourse really are. In this article, I hope to demonstrate some of the difficulties which arise assigning generic categories to texts discussing certain aspects of the post-structuralist theory of Hayden White. I then go on to apply this to three texts George Washington Cable, Attalie Brouillard Salome Muller, White Slave and The `Haunted House' Royal Street included Cable's Strange True Stories of Louisiana (1893). In his book Tropics of Discourse: Essays Cultural Criticism, and most particularly the chapter rifled The Fictions of Factual Representation, Hayden White explores the generic boundaries of literary and historical texts. He begins reaffirming the premise that are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific time-space locations, events which are (or were) principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers--poets, novelists, playwrights--are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical or invented ones (121). However, there are areas which these two discourses overlap. According to White, although historians and imaginative writers may choose to foreground different kinds of events, their discursive forms--and their objectives--may be the same. In addition, spite of the superficial differences, one can observe, one can also observe the recourse to similar strategies or rhetorical techniques. Regarding the aims of the writer of fiction and the writer of history, White affirms that both attempt to present a verbal image of reality. novelist, however, may do so indirectly or figuratively, while the historian does so by registering a series of propositions which are supposed to correspond point point to some extra-textual domain of occurrence or happening (122). Nonetheless, as theorists such as Roman Ingarden have pointed out, the fictional text inevitably contains references to persons, places, and events which exist beyond the text.(1) White thus concludes that part of the conflict between producers of literary and historical texts is related to the conflict between two concepts of truth, that is, the truth of correspondence or of the referentiality of the historical text to extra-textual elements, and the truth of coherence (the ways which the elements the text cohere to form a vision of reality). However, even this distinction can be misleading; for obvious reasons, the historian must strive for textual coherence, just as the writer of fiction must include elements which correspond to extra-textual reality. White thus concludes that all written discourse is cognitive its aims and mimetic its means adding, in this respect, history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical (122). From this perspective, then, the opposition of history to fiction is a legacy of nineteenth-century positivist thought. White argues that prior to the French Revolution, historiography was viewed as a branch of rhetoric and its fictive nature generally recognized. Truth was thus not equated with fact but rather with facts inserted within a conceptual matrix. Therefore, order to represent the truth adequately, one was obliged to use imagination or creativity.(2) However, the latter half of the nineteenth century, truth was increasingly identified with fact, and fiction was seen as the opposite of truth. historical text thus came to be seen as the representation of fact, while fiction purportedly represented the realm of imagination and unreality. Thus, the typical nineteenth-century historian's ideal was objectivity; that is to say, to purge his or her text of any signs of personal or subjective opinion (as though this were possible) and to reject any hint of what might be construed as literary and thus unreal. …
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