Abstract
In this paper I introduce the conception of an “aesthetics ethic” conditioning historical consciousness and writing. The aesthetic ethic is a concept that touches on epistemological, cognitive, aesthetic, experiential, linguistic and ontological qualities that are very much in accord in both historiography and historical novelization. By way of this synthesis, I posit a strong, binding amalgamation that links these two genres. There are a number of transacting ideas and methodological approaches in this work. The focus in this paper is the aesthetic ethic, proper. The aesthetic ethic is a dynamic, densely deliberative field comprising individual and community historical experience, embedded within profoundly aesthetic and conscious contexts, in which history is first lived, and historical writing by historians and historical novelists is then composed. The aesthetics ethic constitutes an environmentality studded with manifold elements of subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity; imagination and artfulness; intentionality and actualization; enunciation and circumscription; reference and contrivance; experience and conjecture; intellection and apperception; contingency and modality. The aesthetics ethic will, I hope, prove to be a useful map revealing details about how historians and historical novelists perceive (one of the source meanings of aesthetic) common facets of historical consciousness amidst a true kinship (one of the source meanings of ethic) of overlapping interests, methods and aims. By way of this overall amalgamation, the synthesis I have referred to is effected, linking the writings and interpretations of historians and historical novelists in important ways. I refer to a number of important analysts in this study, perhaps most importantly John Dewey, Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. As well, an important phase of analysis is my study of Daniel Wickberg’s theory of “histories of sensibilities”.
Highlights
IN THIS PAPER I will introduce the conception of an “aesthetics ethic” conditioning historical consciousness and composition
The aesthetics ethic will, I hope, prove to be a thoroughgoing map revealing details about how historians and historical novelists perceive common facets of historical consciousness amidst a true kinship of overlapping interests, methods and aims. The audiences of these writers return the favor of this visionary, historically-attuned accord, and the sum of these attitudes, perceptions, assumptions and beliefs synchronize in fruitful ways. By way of this synthesis, I will, in a turn perhaps reminiscent of the work of Hayden White, posit a strong, binding amalgamation (I will as often as not refer to historians and historical novelists as a single group of “historical writers”)—and this is an essential motivation of this essay
As Gore Vidal wrote of his historical novel Lincoln, which was written based on extensive research into authentic historical source materials: “All of the principal characters really existed, and they said and did pretty much what I have them saying and doing”. (Note 10) Reconstruction like this, interpreting and answering questions about historical experience and outcomes like these, is an enterprise in which historians and historical novelists are “presented with different but overlapping opportunities,” (Note 11) and we find that these varieties of historical writing become modes in a single transactive paradigm. (Note 12)
Summary
IN THIS PAPER I will introduce the conception of an “aesthetics ethic” conditioning historical consciousness and composition. The aesthetics ethic will, I hope, prove to be a thoroughgoing map revealing details about how historians and historical novelists perceive (one of the source meanings of aesthetic) common facets of historical consciousness amidst a true kinship (one of the source meanings of ethic) of overlapping interests, methods and aims The audiences of these writers return the favor of this visionary, historically-attuned accord, and the sum of these attitudes, perceptions, assumptions and beliefs synchronize in fruitful ways. I hope that we will see the aesthetics ethic as the threshold where historical experience and historical narrative muster, transgress, interlard and effectuate a transactive blend of interpretation and meaning This idea is distilled and adumbrated in the thoughts of Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, who wrote that “Meaning, in a work of narrative art, is a function of the relationship between two worlds: the fictional world created by the author and the ‘real’ world, the apprehendable universe”. This aesthetics ethic framework, I think, accords with the thoughts of historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), who wrote that historical sense is a reticular but methodical synthesis that “proves anew its close connection with the forms of thought of ordinary human life, which would be impossible without general categories into which intelligence organizes phenomena”. (Note 2) Huizinga added that “by reason of its natural bent historical sense always inclines toward the particular, the graphic, the concrete, the unique, the individual”. (Note 3) Huizinga’s conceptions here fit with his research methodology, which held that “no knowledge of the particular is possible without its being understood within a general frame” and, yet more poetically, “Every historical fact opens immediately into eternity”. (Note 4) Huizinga’s thoughts seem to rehearse those of my model, with its “general” philosophical/phenomenological frame of historical consciousness, experience and understanding, alongside larger moral and ethical aims and outcomes in human communities; conditioned by “particular” aesthetic and narrative details, emerging out of conscious and compositional processes and structures
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