History is literature

After reading “The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact” by Hayden White, I am left with confirmation that there truly is no such thing as an unbiased account of anything. Human experience taints any objectivity one could possibly have. Culture, personal knowledge, reader-reception, and a number of other factors play a big role in how history is told and interpreted.

I believe White sums it up with one of his initial statements in the article: “…it is difficult to get an objective history of a scholarly discipline, because if the historianis himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to be a devotee of one or another of its sects and hence biased; and if he is not a practitioner, he is unlikely to have the expertise necessary to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant events of the field’s development.” (p.81)

If a person decides to write an account of a historical event, one of two things had to have happened: either the person has experienced this event first-hand or this person is giving an account of a variety of other historians’ accounts.

In the first case, there is only one unique perspective. This person is giving an account of personal observations and possibly making assumptions based on those particular observations. Obviously, since this is only one perspective, it would certainly not be considered an accurate representation of all of the historical events that took place at this time.

In the second case, there are a variety of perspectives. At first, this may seem the most accurate since it incorporates a variety of sources. However, unless the historian is researching every single first-hand account of every single person alive during that time, it is certain to be inaccurate. As a matter of fact, even if this historian, by some bizarre circumstance, could get such information, there is still no guarantee that the story is accurate because it is still individual interpretation… both by the author and the reader. Furthermore, for every account that is not first-hand, the account becomes more and more unclear. I am reminded of the game “telephone” where a phrase is passed on from one person to the next in a line until finally at the end, when the last person says the phrase out loud, everyone realizes that the end phrase is not the same phrase that was initially stated. Somewhere along the line, the message was lost.

In this article, White states that history is a narrative and that historical narratives are verbal fictions. To me, it is obvious that history is literature. Afterall, what else can it be? History is not a quantitative discipline where “a=b.” As White points out, there is no specific form. History is written by humans that act as filters. Whether it is done intentionally or unintentionally, humans recount history through a cast set by their own experiences. It is impossible to avoid as even within a culture, there are subcultures and among subcultures, there are individuals. History is written to tell a story of a story and therefore will no doubt contain a part of the author. Of course it is literature! Then again, what is literature?