Charles Brockden Brown and the "Art of the Historian": An Essay concerning (Post)Modern Historical Understanding

Abstract

In the inaugural publication of his Annals of Europe and America, which appeared serially in the American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics & Science from 1807-09, Charles Brockden Brown commented on the difficulties of history writing, remarking that the chain of successive and dependent causes is endless and that an active imagination was necessary for representing the past. An individual, wrote Brown, be said to be imperfectly acquainted with the last link, who has not attentively scrutinized the very first in the series, however remote it may be.1 Although this early American novelist used his knowledge of to write narrative, his self-conscious commentary about history writing may seem unremarkable given our familiarity with romantic history writers such as Washington Irving and William Prescott and the more modern assumption that the historian seeks truth but can never really obtain it in an absolute shape or form.2 Yet recent debates about and the boundaries between fact and fiction in history writing have returned scholars to this familiar territory, causing historians to re-evaluate assumptions of progress and reasoning associated with methods of late Enlightenment historiography and the empirical foundationalism of history's literary form.3 Most prominently, the publication of Robert Berkhofer's Beyond the Great Story has renewed the long-standing disagreement over representation and the role of poststructuralist theories in understanding the rhetorical and ideological aspects of inquiry. As Betsy Erkkila has observed, the very moment when literary critics are turning to history as the solid ground of their cultural analysis, historians are experiencing an increasing crisis about the ontological status of history itself.4 Historians are, in other words, reassessing more closely than ever long-standing Enlightenment assumptions about the form and purpose of history. At the heart of such debates is the degree to which historians are willing to examine-and accept-history as a literary artifact and to concede certainty and meaning. While such debates often focus on the inherent contradictions of opposing views and the value of inter- and intradisciplinary inquiry, minimal attention has been given to the ways late eighteenth-century historians and novelists grappled with issues concerning representation and truth and how such inquiries correspond with our own.5 That is, if, as Peter Novick has observed, the objectivist point of view has remained the ideal: It has been the key term in defining progress in scholarship,6 several questions linger about and aesthetic issues at the end of the eighteenth century and how they relate to contemporary debates about representation and narrative meaning. For example, if early national history writers understood the question relative to then overlapping perceptions of writing and fiction, to what extent were those modes of writing distinguished from each other in the late eighteenth century? Did romantic ideas, in other words, about the role and meaning of history intersect or overlap with late Enlightenment ones and alter methods of representation? By extension, if greater self-consciousness is one of the windfalls of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century historiography, to what degree does discourse from that period about historical objectivity and bias relate to our own debates about the fictive nature of history writing? Are boundaries, historiographical or otherwise, always in place, or can past ways of approaching, or writing about, history resemble and inform the present? That is, if it is possible that we postmoderns have unfairly characterized the Age of Reason as essentially rational or objective, have we also given too much credence to poststructuralists and their claims or assumptions about narrative meaning and linguistic representation? …