Re-Presenting the Past: A Note on Narrative Historiography and Historical Drama

Abstract

It has often been noted how eagerly playwrights go to historical events for their plots. One reason for this is suggested in the ninth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics: dramatic works need an air of plausibility, and what better indication that a series of events is possible than the fact that it actually occurred? A no less valid reason for dramatizing history might be proposed from the historiographer's point of view: historical works need an air of authenticity, and what better indication that a series of events actually occurred than the fact that it can be re-enacted without the palpable presence of a narrator's mediating consciousness? Speaking in terms of literary genres, the tales of historiography are based on the plays of history. Yet historians seldom presume to imitate the Supreme Producer by merely presenting the show. Rather, they will mingle with the actors on the plain stage of printed pages and minister to the needs of their audience the readers of history books more or less directly. This apparent modesty is motivated, of course, by the historian's ambition to do better than simply reproduce the past. He wants to re-present it with hindsight, disclosing patterns of cause and purpose of which the participants in the original events could not have been fully aware. But the skillful historian does not turn enacted drama into narrated tale by standing in front of the closed curtain, so to speak, with his back turned on the dramatis personae whose own sense of identity relies on their relationship to each other. He knows that we expect him to make us see the past from within and from without at the same time as evolving drama and as the fixed target of distanced retrospection. I hope to contribute to the exploration of that dual mode of vision by contrasting, in the first part of this essay, the historian's use of verbal signs to the scientist's and the novelist's, and by focusing, in the second and third parts, on differences and similarities between narrative historiography and historical drama.