Nancy Ali
CRLC – Paris IV Sorbonne, France
Abstract
This paper
deals with the new conventions of representing reality in both the literary and
the historical texts. Alongside memory, history and fiction are the two other
domains from which we derive knowledge of our past. We have chosen to compare
the literary narrative with the historical one. Where is the place of fiction
alongside this often totalizing and totalitarian pillar of knowledge?
Furthermore, we explore the way in which fiction and history interact in the
contemporary novel. Contemporary novels often incorporate extra-literary
discourses in their texts in an attempt to show that any discourse on the real
is always a work of fiction because it is discursively constructed. By
incorporating such fragments of history within their fictive world, these
contemporary novels point our attention to the similarities between the
literary and historical texts, both of which resort to narrative techniques in
order to represent the past and give meaning to it. The insistence on the
notion of narrativity in historiographic research over the last decades has
brought into question the legitimacy of the once incontestable historical
archives. By stressing on the inevitable subjectivity of the once so-called
objective historical documents, contemporary historians have demonstrated the
way in which history uses narrative techniques similar to that of fiction to
establish order and make sense the dispersed events of the past. Because
narrative form is in itself a way of ordering and “bringing together” the
fragmented events and incoherencies of reality, narrative form in itself often
violently manipulates this reality with the aim of giving meaning to an often
inexplicable reality. Even in the autobiographical text, deemed truthful, or
the historical document, deemed objective, we always write the past from the
present, that is we predict the past from the prism of the present thanks to
what Ricoeur has called the “traces” of the past, namely the archives,
testimonies, photographs and other “already written” texts. So doing, both the
literary and historical texts attempt to order reality with the aim of arriving
at a certain representation of it that expresses an intended signification.
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