Narration and the experience of history

Abstract

Abstract For a long time, history has been conceived as a textual fact, whether as positive knowledge of the past, reported in chronicles and original sources, or through acknowledgment of its textual basis, assumed as historiography, as narrative history. In either case, the text appears as the source and goal of knowledge, and has assumed the nature of an immutable monument, an invariable object of reference and information. These texts are limited to constituting a regulatory storehouse of knowledge, a mere object of appropriation. In contrast, we can consider history not just as knowledge enclosed in textual containers, but as experience inscribed in peoples´ memory. This is what Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman suggests with his proposal to consider history as readers formulating their own versions of the past. Through these proposals, semiotics is in a position to describe the role of texts in the production of a vicarious experience of history through the act of reading. This paper provides examples taken from accounts of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and proposes a semiotic interpretation of the experience of history.