History, a Literary Artifact? The Traveling Concept of Narrative in/on Historiographic Discourse

Abstract

Ever since its ancient days, history (oral, written, or otherwise mediated) has been traveling across and between the boundaries of fact-based sciences and of (imaginary) literature. It seems quite telling that Herodotus as well as Thucydides are considered founding fathers of occidental history. Herodotus, born in Halicarnassus in the fifth century b.c., is most well known for his monumental work The Histories, based on the wars between the Greeks and the Persians (499–79 b.c.). In his attempt to report on events and, especially, on the conflicts between warring nations, Herodotus makes deliberate use of literary techniques, such as ring composition, psychonarration, and direct speech. He not only describes events but also provides insight into the thoughts and feelings of historical agents. In addition, he refrains from giving an authoritative account of past events and their cause-effect relations. On the contrary, his narrative is interspersed with hearsay, speculation, myths, and different versions of events contributed by different eyewitnesses or involved parties. Herodotus leaves ample room for the audience to form an opinion of its own. He frequently comments on his sources and on his manner of presenting them: “Anyone can adopt whichever of these alternative stories he finds most plausible; in any case, I have stated my own opinion”; “I will report views about this country shared by other people as well as by the Egyptians. This will be supplemented as well by what I personally saw” (2008, 2:147, 154).1Simon Schama, one of the most popular contemporary British historians, is completely charmed by Herodotus's manner of recording history and offers this description: “His relish for gossip, his intuitive understanding of the idiosyncrasies of climate and geography, his primitive ethnography, his unabashed subjectivities, the winning mishmash of hearsay and record, real and fantastic” (1989, 325).In contrast to his immediate predecessor and fellow historian Herodotus, Thucydides (c. 460 b.c.–c. 395 b.c.), author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, approached the art of writing history from a different, what we would today call a more scientific angle. He took as his model the new methodology of Hippocratic doctors, who had taken to recording medical data (symptoms as well as treatments and their effects) in order to be able to more accurately diagnose a complaint in the future (Southgate 2011, 133). Thucydides hoped that he could apply a similar method to history and, by meticulously collecting historical data, deduce from them general laws applicable to human nature and behavior. He thus established a tradition of authoritative historical/political realism based on the recording of facts about contemporary political and military events taken, as Thucydides claims, from unequivocal, eyewitness accounts (see Thucydides 1910, 1:23).The two Greek historians from the fifth century b.c. illustrate well the different traditions of Western history-writing coming to life in its ancient cradle. On the one hand, there is fact-based history, considered a science among others, such as medicine or arithmetic, and, on the other hand, there is history as one of the humanities, open to interpretation and a variety of meanings, considered a form of literary/aesthetic art, such as poetry or rhetoric. Both Herodotus and Thucydides wrote narrative accounts of the past; that is, they use narrative discourse with a fabula and a plot line to recount what happened. In fact, their narrative practices aren't altogether that different from one another. Both try to create a lively and detailed picture of events, and both use narrative devices borrowed from literary arts. Even though Thucydides claims to record only well-established fact, he also provides insight into historical agents' perspectives, expectations, and motives, a technique that Grethlein describes as “side-shadowing” (2010, 323), a term coined by Gary Saul Morson in Narrative and Freedom (1994). “Side-shadowing” is used to (re)create the “presentness” of the past, that is, a kind of in actu atmosphere, in which we, for example, directly witness a character ponder an issue or look with him or her down a mountaintop.2 The difference in Herodotus's and Thucydides's accounts is one less of narrative presentation than of narrative conception, expressed on the level of metacommentary. While Herodotus openly acknowledges including hearsay, unreliable accounts, and colorful tales, Thucydides doesn't comment on his sources or on different contesting versions of the same story. The difference between the two historians is in their attitudes toward the nature of history. For Thucydides it is foremost a fact-based empirical science that results in authoritative “true” accounts, and for Herodotus it seems to be much more fluid and open to contestation and revision—a narrative-construction.The example of Herodotus and Thucydides demonstrates the two levels on which the concept of narrative figures in the realm of history writing: On the one hand, storytelling is part of historical practice, that is, the actual creation of historical accounts.3 On the other, it is an aspect of the concept of what history is and according to which rules it functions. As we saw in the case of Thucydides, his ideal of a fact-based history didn't deter him from using narrative devices usually reserved for literature. Theory and practice do not always go hand in hand; they may influence each other, however.In this article, I would like to briefly chart the reciprocal and changing relationship between history and its narrative realization. I shall explore this liaison on the level of theoretical discussions on the form and function of history, as well as on the level of the practice of history writing. After a short historical survey, I concentrate on the narrative and cognitive turns of the twentieth century and discuss their impact on history writing and historiographic studies. Finally, I shall explore current trends in history and historiography and suggest an agenda for the future study of the process of narrating the past.The strongly manifested historical realism of the nineteenth century should not blur the fact that until the middle of the eighteenth century history writing was mainly categorized as an art form, namely, as an interpretation and a (re)construction of past events. Renaissance Europe regarded history as literary art and the historian as a writer artist (Canary and Kozicki 1978, 3–4). For centuries, the distinction between history and literature was practically nonexistent. A writer of history simply differentiated between fictional or historical narrative instead. At the onset of the eighteenth century, historians concentrated primarily on the accuracy and truth-value of their representations, while still organizing their narratives in structures typical of fictional narratives. Voltaire, for example, describes the act of writing history as a creative process: “History, like tragedy, requires an exposition, a central action and a denouement…. I have tried to move my reader, even in history” (letter from August 1, 1752, no. 4163, in Besterman 1965). Authors like Voltaire understood history as a modern successor of the epic genre. All in all, historiography and historical practice in the eighteenth century are marked by a clear distinction between what is narrated and the act of narrating it (i.e., histoire and discours). Historical presentation is not understood as an objective re-creation of the past; characteristic of eighteenth-century historical discourse is a discussion of the legitimacy of each individual interpretation of past events.Already in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, philosophers such as René Descartes (1596–1650) insisted that in order to study an object, one needs to distance oneself from it. Furthermore, scientists developed new paradigms for research, such as the fixed coordinates of space and time introduced by Isaac Newton (1643–1727). These new scientific methods came to influence historiography significantly only in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beverley Southgate describes this new “scientific” approach to history very poignantly: “History was to be emphatically defined by reference to science—this time, to a science that blended the mechanistic explanations of the Newtonian universe, within its reassuring framework of absolute space and time, with the narrative convictions of Darwinian evolution, which promoted the welcome trajectory of progress” (2011, 135).Southgate argues that with the widespread interest in, and increasing development of, natural sciences, and, especially, through the impact of Darwinian theory, history was transformed into a “science” in its own right. It was in this spirit that one of the founders of the English Historical Review, Mandell Creighton, pronounced his agenda to pursue history “for its own sake in a calm and scientific spirit” (1886, 5).At the end of the neoclassicist period, the long-established “marriage” of literature and history started to crumble. The result was a split into two separate disciplines: history writing was declared an empiric science whose object of research was the real historical past, and poetry/literature (and as such historical fiction) was positioned within the realm of the imaginary nonscientific. By the end of the 1700s, the eighteenth-century distinction between object and subject, past and present, the narrated and narrative discourse began to disappear. Overt narrator-historians gave way to covert authorial narrators. Historical texts were no longer regarded primarily as disputable models but were seen as objectified facts (Gossman 1978, 5–6). Of course, some thinkers denied any separation between history and literature. Most famously, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and his friend Charles Dickens (1812–1870) questioned the possibility of an objective history based on fixed constituents of time and space (see Carlyle 1836). Further evidence of a denial of a clear-cut distinction between history and literature is the flourishing genre of historical fiction, most notably the works of Sir Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe, today considered one of the landmarks of nineteenth-century literature. Again, we see a discrepancy between theory and literary practice.Already by the end of the nineteenth century, English philosophers such as Francis Herbert Bradley had begun increasingly to challenge the possibility of “objective” history (1874). They established the today widely accepted wisdom that a historian's ideology determines his or her view and interpretation of past events and, thus, his or her representation of them. By the mid-twentieth century, the existence of objective historical facts was strongly contested, and it was assumed not that the historian was involved in a process of subjectively but logically arranging “real” facts but that he or she generated or created these facts. The English historian and philosopher Robin George Collingwood calls this process “imaginative construction,” which he defines as “something far more solid and powerful than we have hitherto realized. So far from relying for its validity upon the support of given facts, it actually serves as the touchstone by which we decide whether alleged facts are genuine” (1946, 243–44). History was now regarded as the product of the individual historian or of a group of historians at a specific point in time in a particular place. E. H. Carr subsumed the consequences of this perspective for the study of history in What Is History as “Before you study the history, study the historian” (1961, 54).Interestingly, in the early twentieth century, when criticism against “objective” or “objectified” history was strong, the Annales School of historians initiated so-called social science history. Scholars of the Annales School collected vast amounts of data and concentrated their research on the collective, on multiple causes of historical developments, and less on individual historical agents. So, in the early twentieth century, at a point in time when historiographic theory and philosophy actually free history of its claim for objective truths, historians distance themselves from literary methods, turning instead to quantitative data to validate their work.The “subjective turn” in the philosophy of history, as we may term it, gave way to the “narrative turn” in the 1960s. Roland Barthes, with his essay “Le discourse de l'histoire” (1967), was one of the first theorists to focus attention on the narrative makeup of history and to demand that we study its form rather than its content or its relation to the “real.” Barthes basically assumes that historical narration does not differ from any other form of literary narration. Hayden White famously adopts this idea in Metahistory (1973), in which he asserts: “In this theory I treat historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. Histories (and philosophies of history as well) combine a certain amount of ‘data,’ theoretical concepts for ‘explaining’ these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation as an icon of sets of events presumed to have occurred in times past. In addition, I maintain, they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature” (ix).This quotation combines all basic assumptions of White's theory. He regards historical text as verbal construct, as a human-created linguistic artifact in the form of prose discourse. In contrast to Mink, for example, White doesn't believe that history exists in the form of stories with a beginning, a middle, and an immanent ending (teleological structure); he argues that historians of the Occident chose narrative as a mode of (re)telling the past and thus “transformed narrativity from a manner of speaking into a paradigm of the form that reality itself displays” (1987, 24). White regards history as “interpretation of whatever information about and knowledge of the past the historians command” (1999, 3). In his theory, White concentrates on the deep structure of historical discourse, namely, on the poetic and linguistic principles that determine a historian's interpretation of the past—his or her selection, arrangement, and explanation of historical data. According to White, the linguistically determined perception of the world is limited by tropological criteria (1991, 3). In organizing their historical data, historians can gain access to only specific figurative tropological structures that guide their interpretative strategies. White differentiates between four basic types of tropological structures: metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche, and irony. When a historian, for example, uses synecdoche, the presented historical processes function as paradigm for overarching holistic historical worlds (microcosm-macrocosm-ideology).The tropological positioning is followed by what White calls the act of “emplotment,” that is, “the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot-structures” (1978, 48). Emplotment is the process by which historians encode and synthesize historical data into a coherent narrative/story. The reader then makes sense of the (hi)story by decoding the plot structure or the plot type (tragedy, comedy, etc.); this is to say, “the events are rendered comprehensible by being subsumed under the categories of the plot-structure in which they are encoded as a story of a particular kind” (49). The historian as well as his or her audience takes his or her plot structures from conventional fictional literature. White talks directly of narrative structures that are conventionally used to attach culturally sanctified meanings to everyday experiences. As a consequence of his theorizing, White regards it as unequivocally necessary to treat history as we treat novels and to research its discursive structures.White's formalistic reading of history strongly influenced postmodern historiography. It was less his theory of the tropologically and linguistically determined nature of historical logic than his treatment of history as verbal construct that had a lasting effect. After White, it was no longer possible to ignore the narrative nature of history and to view the narrative makeup of history as attire that can conveniently be taken off to get at the bare facts. Historians and literary scholars started to closely analyze the narrative structure of history texts. Gossman (1990) and Gearhart (1984) studied eighteenth-century historiographic narratives; Bann (1984), Süssmann (2000), and Rigney (1990, 2001) looked at narrative history of the nineteenth century; and Carrard (1992) and Berkhofer (1997) concentrated on twentieth-century history. However, most of these studies remained rather sketchy, concentrating mainly on one narrative criterion. Carrard, for example, analyses works of New Historicism with the help of Genette's logical schemata of the onomastic identity of author and narrator, claiming that in historical narrative the author is also the narrator. Carrard was able to prove that in contrast to their set objective agenda, New Historians made deliberate use of first-person narration, thus violating the axiom author = narrator of historical discourse.An important legacy of White's theory was that the study of history writing was increasingly taken up by literary scholars in general and narratologists in particular. During the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, most historiographers and narratologists studying history texts applied structuralist narratological methods, as introduced by Franz K. Stanzel, Gérard Genette, and Mieke Bal for fictional narratives. The most commonly examined narrative criteria were those of voice, perspective, and emplotment.4 In general, the idea was that on the discourse level history works the same way as fictional narrative and can be analyzed by similar methods. Nonetheless, on the content level, or rather on the level of reference, history and fiction were not necessarily equated. Robert Holton nicely pins down the attitude of most scholars in the 1980s and (early) 1990s toward the fact/fiction demarcation: “While fiction and history ought by no means to be conflated, the similarity of the mediating roles played by concepts such as intentionality and point of view in the discussion of the writing both of history as narrative and of narrative fiction tends to work against the absolute separation of these two genres. Generic differences certainly exist, yet inasmuch as both seek to construct coherent narrative representations of events the similarity is worth examining” (1994, 11).Holton emphasizes that history and fiction are two different genre types that use the same discourse strategies. As a consequence, the same methods of discourse analysis are applicable.As a result of the narrative turn in historiography, the historical profession experienced what Richard J. Evans characterized as a “deep crisis.” Historians had to face the common understanding that what they “wrote was their own invention and not a true or objective representation of past reality, which was in essence irrecoverable” (2002, 7). Interestingly, the crisis didn't lead to a breakdown in the discipline but, on the contrary, to quite a self-confident reemergence. For several sociocultural reasons, the 1990s witnessed an unprecedented interest in history.5 The genre of popular history flourished in all its guises: monuments, historical film, TV documentaries, exhibitions on historical periods and personages, popular history books, the faction genre, TV history shows, historical drama, and historical fiction.6 In contrast to the earlier practice of presenting historical accounts in a detached authoritative third-person narrative style, historians and presenters of history shows and history programs now turned to announcing emphatically that the audience was going to be presented with their personal reading and interpretation of past events, albeit based on thorough research and expert insight. As Evans points out, the fact that historians were now largely treated as novelists created a cultural climate in which historians could adopt a highly personalized style without sacrificing their claim to represent the past as expertly and accurately as possible (15). Evans argues that since there was no “correct” or “true” version of the past attainable, and there was nothing but subjective readings of the past, historians were now free to present their individual “truths” and act as emancipated authoritative experts.As it is, the (structuralist) narrative turn didn't lead to more carefully presented history full of conjectural and inferential operators, such as possibly, most likely, and so on, and to accounts that offered different versions open to argument. Instead, it generated highly authoritative presentations that were introduced as the achievements of a particular historian's research and his or her understanding of past events. Particularly, popular historians freely use narrative techniques typical of novels or fiction film, such as interior focalization (direct point of view of a historical agent), psychonarration, and narrated monologue (direct insight into the thoughts and feelings of historical personages). In addition, they don't comment on such highly fictionalized methods, outing them as deliberate speculation.In a BBC Timewatch documentary about Great Britain's George III (reigned 1760–1820), “How Mad Was King George?” (2004), for example, one of the experts, Susan Groom, commenting on George III's mourning for his little son Alfred, adopts a first-person voice in relating his feelings: “I am very sorry about Alfred. But had it been Octavius … I would have died too.” In a reenacted scene, we then hear sounds of weeping and gaze at children's clothing spread on the ground. The documentary directly presents George III's feelings without any mention of sources or hints about the degree of conjecture in this reading. Such fictionalized representations of consciousness are not limited to TV shows but are also frequently found in other forms of popular and academic history writing. However, in the latter, we find more frequently the technique of psychonarration, used in the manner of Herodotus and Thucydides, rather than that of interior monologue.7 In short, history of the past thirty years is to a great degree characterized by self-conscious historian-narrators who present authoritative, teleological narratives and who freely incorporate discourse strategies borrowed from imaginary literature.While the “narrative turn” “emancipated” historians into self-confident author-narrators, narratologists and historiographers were trying to find the right means of defining and analyzing historical discourse. As early as 1990, Dorrit Cohn called for a modal system of historical discourse analogous to typologies of fictional narrative (1990). Until today, no satisfactory modal system for historiographic discourse has been established, but several scholars took up Cohn's challenge. Vera and Ansgar Nünning treat history as a genre in its own right and suggest working on a typology for historiographic discourse (2002, 18). Daniel Fulda, for example, aims at a cognitive narratology of history writing (2005, 173–94), and Stephan Jaeger suggests a context-oriented narratology, anchored within cultural studies (2002, 260). All these narratological inquiries into historiographic discourse of the late 1990s and early 2000s observe that history writing is a cross-medial phenomenon. Quite often, narratologists use exhibitions (e.g., Fulda 2005) and documentaries (e.g., Jaeger 2002) as case studies to underpin their argument. Scholars increasingly begin to turn away from classical structuralist narratology and look for alternatives that seem more adequate to the study of historiographic narratives, realized in a variety of media, than structuralist criteria geared toward written discourse. This tendency is true for the study of narrative discourse in general and is part of the so-called cognitive turn within narrative studies.One of the first narratologists to introduce narrative as a cross-medial “text type” was Seymour Chatman (see Chatman 1990, 114). He belongs to the structuralist school that binds the concept of narrative to the existence of a fabula/story that can be realized via different discursive forms and, hence, in a variety of media formats. Cognitive narratologists (e.g, David Herman, Monika Fludernik, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Werner Wolf) anchor the concept of narrative in its function, for example, of opening up possible worlds (Ryan 2004; Doležel 2010), of evoking real-world experiences (Fludernik 1996), or of “providing human beings with one of their primary resources for organizing and comprehending experience” (Herman 2001, 130–31). Most important, cognitive narratologists understand narrative meaning creation as a process that combines the production and reception of texts (see Herman 2003). Hence, in historiographic narratology the question was no longer limited to how historians create what kind of history, but how audiences make sense of these texts (see Lippert 2009, 2010).Cognitive narratologists agree neither on the functional nature of narrative nor on the position of history within the cognitive concept of narrative. Some narratologists, such as Monika Fludernik, more or less exclude “history proper” from the macro-genre narrative on the grounds that its function is to provide an argument and not to retrospectively reflect on the experiences of past agents.8 Others (e.g., Alun Munslow, Keith Jenkins, Robert A. Rosenstone, Beverley Southgate) took the “postmodern challenge” to historiography, as Doležel terms it, to the extreme, radicalizing Hayden White's postulate of emplotment = literary operation = fiction making into history = fiction, and thus into the dogma: “Historiography does not re-present the past; it creates it” (Doležel 2007, 49). The idea was that if narratives produce possible worlds, that is, versions of as-if worlds (fiction) and “real worlds” (history), and if the means (narrative strategies) of producing them and hence the cognitive strategies of decoding them are identical, then there is no longer the need to postulate a difference.Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow in their highly acclaimed book, The Nature of History Reader, explain that history is first and foremost a literary undertaking and not, as historians have long held, a science based on empirical method (2004, 1). Doležel emphasizes further that audiences, “(inspired by) popular appropriations of historical fiction,” often mistake historical fiction for historical presentation (2007, 181). As a consequence, historiographer-narratologists such as Jenkins, Munslow, Southgate, and Rosenstone call on historians to change their attitude towards their work and their modes of presenting the past (see Jenkins and Munslow 2004; Munslow 2011; Southgate 2011; Rosenstone 2004).9 Instead of using the supposed equation of history = fiction in order to freely integrate fictional narrative strategies in highly authoritative, stringent, and teleologically organized accounts of the past, thereby still treating history writing as science that purports to tell some truth about the past, scholars demand that historians openly comment on their production process and that they include or invite contesting accounts. They are arguing that since historical worlds are created via the same means as fictional possible worlds, historians, instead of imitating authorial narrators of nineteenth-century realist fiction, should start to learn from postmodern writers and create (hi)stories that are fluid, multifaceted, and open to contestation (e.g., Rosenstone 2004, 4).Studies on experimental postmodern history by Robert F. Berkhofer (1997), Keith Jenkins (1997), Munslow and Rosenstone (2004), Doležel (2007, 2010), and Stephan Jaeger (2011) have revealed that some among the multitude of historiographic works successfully adopt methods of twentieth-century literature without tipping the balance towards fictional-possible worlds instead of historically possible worlds. One of the most often cited early examples is Simon Schama's Citizens, a narrative history of the French Revolution. In his introduction to the volume, Schama announces his approach thus: “What follows (I need hardly say) is not science. It has no pretensions to dispassion. Though in no sense fiction (for there is no deliberate invention), it may well strike the reader as story rather than history. It is an exercise in animated description, a negotiation with a two-hundred-year memory without any pretence of definitive closure” (1989, 6).Schama doesn't purport to present an objective, nonjudgmental grand narrative of the French Revolution. He clearly states that he uses the two-hundred-year record available to present a particular version that remains open to contestation. Doležel closely studied Schama's Citizens and illustrates how, by using different strands of personal stories based on meticulously collected evidence (provided in notes), Schama creates a nonfiction story. One gets the impression that a “cast performs the drama of the Revolution,” creating a “multifaceted flow with many individual centers” (Doležel 2007, 55). Just like any other history text, Citizens is full of gaps that are filled by conjecture. But Schama scrupulously notes the gaps in documentation and makes frequent use of probability operators, such as undoubtedly, possibly, or perhaps to mark conjectures (Doležel 2007, 54). What emerges is a well-documented mosaic of personal and collective experience during the French Revolution.Stephan Jaeger in his recent article “Poietic Worlds and Experientiality in Historiographic Narrative” (2011) discusses different examples of postmodern history writing, ranging from Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914 (2008), to Karl Schlögel's Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 (2008), and from Michael Kloft's Spiegel TV documentary Feuerstorm to a permanent exhibition called Kraków Under Nazi Occupation, 1939–1945 in Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory (opened in 2010). Jaeger vividly shows how these works create, for example, multiple temporal layers, memory mosaics, and memory spaces in order to allow the audience to (re)experience the past.To summarize the current trends in narrative history writing and historiographic narratology: the past thirty years witnessed, along with a prolific output of history writing along the lines of nineteenth-century (fictional) realism, the emergence of a body of history that adopts narrative devices typical of (modern) and twentieth-century literature, presenting a possible past based on meticulously documented evidence. Historiography, in turn, welcomes such open and multifaceted histories and sets itself the task to inquire into and work toward a typology of historically possible worlds (e.g., Doležel 2007, 32; Jaeger 2011).This survey of the reciprocal relationship of history and narrative and of history writing and historiographic scholarship has shown that narrative has remained the dominant mode of (re)presenting the past, while the concept of narrative and the narrative techniques used to portray past events and experiences have been modified over time. Until the late eighteenth century, history writing belonged to the realm of literature. Authors freely used fictional narrative devices to create their individual accounts of the past. With changing attitudes toward reality and the way to “capture” it, history was transferred to the field of objective sciences in the nineteenth century, marked by a distanced authorial voice, claiming to represent empirically sanctified fact, only to be catapulted back into the sphere of the “imaginary” at the beginning of the twentieth century. Again historians stressed their work as a subjective form of interpretation, based, however, on scientific research and empirical methods. With the structuralist turn in the 1970s that equated history with fiction on the discourse level, the historical profession experienced a deep crisis that was soon overcome and that inspired highly authoritative, teleological accounts of the past, with (popular) historians making free use of fictional narrative devices. The cognitive turn and postmodern historiography increasingly started to challenge historians who failed to understand their work as narrative creation, who declined to open their presentations to contestation, and who didn't comment on the creation process. The postmodern period also witnessed the emergence of historiographic works that adopted methods of twentieth-century literature and created possible historical worlds that allowed audiences to (re)experience the past.“Experience” and “experientiality” are concepts of increasing importance to an understanding of the function of narrative. Experientiality denotes the characteristic of a text to retrospectively evoke past experiences (as for example in a first-person reminiscence of a particular event) or to allow the audience to (re)experience an episode, for example, by guiding its gaze with a camera down the precipice on which a suicidal character is standing.10 While early studies denied the existence of experientiality in historiographic texts, new inquiries stress the importance of experience for historiographic narratives, since, as they argue, one of its main functions is to (re)create what it was like to live in a certain place at a certain time (Jaeger 2011; Meretoja 2011). As I stated earlier, one of the main innovations of the cognitive approach to narrative was the insight that the process of narrative sense-making was situated on two levels: production and reception. Applied to the concept of experience this meant that on the one hand, it is part of the production process that tries to (re)create experiences, as well as part of the reception process, in which the audience (re)lives experiences or experiences the past as such, as for example, in a particularly designed museum space. In the quotation above from Schama's Citizens, the author stresses that the audience might read the account as story rather than as history, clearly indicating that the process of decodation by the audience is of vital importance (6). Additionally, Doležel's warning that audiences often mistake historical fiction for history (2007, 181) points at the significance of “readerly” meaning-making in the construction of cultural memory. It seems as if historians as well as (cognitive) narratologists are aware of the role of the recipient in the process of narratively making sense of the past. Theoretical narrative models, such as the one I developed for historio(bio) graphical works (Lippert 2010) often include the process of encodation and decodation, but as it is, such models are primarily based on theoretical conjectures of a (usually well-educated and media-experienced) model “reader.”Just as postmodern historiographers demand of historians that they deal more professionally with conjectures, I suggest that historiographic narratologists and cultural analysts need to broach the issue of how audiences make sense of historiographic accounts and the different narrative techniques they use empirically in order to be able to explain and to understand how (H)istory is created in postmodern society.