Introduction: The Form of the Content of the Form
2008; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Philippine History and Culture
ResumoHISTORY IS A TALE WE TELL OURSELVES ABOUT THE PAST, BUT THERE IS NO past, not here, not now. There is only the present, including the odd fragments from the wreck of the past that have washed ashore around us. We look these over, we read the words inscribed on some of the pieces, we guess at the gaps, and we construct a story, and then we do it all over again, for the present in which the tale was told is now itself part of the past and has to be wrapped into the narrative. Fans of Hayden White will recognize two thirds of my title, his pioneering work of metahistory, The Content of the Form, invited historians to look at the way they typically present their findings, as narratives. Taking his cue from Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, in which Marx claimed that history repeats itself, but the second time around turns tragedy into farce, white asked who chooses these modes of tragedy and farce, is it history, revealing its true shape, or is it the historian who must have a story to tell and can only do so in the forms provided by culture? In either case, forms are not empty vessels. They already hold something, before any facts are poured in: a sketch of a plot, a handful of character roles such as hero and antagonist, a desired outcome, a logic of cause and effect. Such contents are meaningful. They sort information into clusters and make certain facts stand out and others recede into the background. They tell us what an ending is, and where to look for new beginnings. I find white's insight provocative and penetrating. My historian friends are not always so impressed, but I'm not sure whether that's because they think it is obvious or because they don't like to examine their own thought processes too closely. The one thing I wish white paid more attention to is the idea of story itself, where do we learn the narrative structures into which we fit historical events? is every history both recit and conte: story and story-telling? Does narrative on a large scale--the story of a tribe or a nation--really work the same way as personal narrative, or do terms like tragedy and farce lead us into seeing a similarity where none exists? And why those two forms? Why not tell history in the form of a bildungsroman or a detective novel--or fantasy? There are, of course, many historical fantasies: fictions in which impossible events are interwoven with real persons, places, and movements. Tim Powers constructs especially deft fantastic interpolations into history, inserting real lamias and belles dames sans merci into the lives of the Romantic poets and turning casino builder Bugsy Siegel into the Fisher King. Other writers write plausible histories of nonexistent places: Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, and of course J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. A lot of science fiction incorporates what has come to be called future history: John W. Campbell coined the term to describe Robert A. Heinlein's self-consistent timelines, and other outstanding examples include Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels, James Blish's Cities in Flight quartet, Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Chronicles, Frank Herbert's Dune series, and Cordwainer Smith's stories of the Instumentality of Mankind. Besides future history there is alternative history. Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), for instance, investigates the historical processes we think we understand by imagining them starting from different premises: Europe dead of the plague, Islam filling the historical niche occupied by Christianity, colonial empires launched from China and India. Some works of sf and more than a few fantasies examine the writing of history itself. Among the latter are Diana Wynne Jones's The Crown of Dalemark (1993), John Crowley's Agypt, aka The Solitudes (1987), and Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman's The Fall of the Kings (2002). But none of these quite dare to write history--real world history--as fantasy. …
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