From dialectics to dialogue: Bakhtin, White and the ‘moorings’ of fiction and history

Abstract

Scholars have noted the ‘remarkable proliferation’ of historical fiction in the postmodern period, and Hayden White has described the neo-historical novel as ‘the dominant genre and mode of postmodernist writing’. This recent acknowledgment of the status of neo-historical fiction raises questions about the long estrangement between the discourses of history and the historical novel since 19th century historians began defining their discipline as a social science. Historians remain preoccupied with timespace specific ‘observable or perceivable’ events, while imaginative writers also engage hypothetical and invented ones, however, this article argues that the theoretical grounds for a vigorous interdisciplinary dialogue between fictional and non-fictional historiography are apparent in the work of White and Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of the novel and concepts of dialogism and polyphony are now much discussed in scholarly discourse. By remaining open to the historical referent, rejecting structuralism’s closure in the text, and acknowledging the subjective tendencies in all forms of historiography, White and Bakhtin make new and exciting conversations possible in an environment in which history and fiction can be defined as competing but complimentary discourses.