February 10, 2007

Historical narrative as a literary artifact

 

Whenever I think about history as a literary artifact, nothing comes better to mind as the chronicles of the New World exploration.  These accounts are filled with mythical references with specific intentions for its audience.  Hayden White discusses the creation of historical narratives as an unlikelyliterary genre that has been used to express certain points of view as and objective reality.  This argument could most certainly be applied to those chronicles of the Conquest of the Americas.  The authors of those chronicles would relativize their experiences in order to better relay what it was they were seeing in this new environment.  Vocabulary for these new things was not available so thus the new American wonders were subjected to European terminology.  The work becomes a sort of verbal artifact as the current reader can distinguish the verbal codes and tendancies stated within the work as contextual clues ofthe author’s influences and possible purpose.  White’s theory is very applicable to the new world chronicles but when it comes to more contemporary works, his theory more difficult to apply.  The modern historian has in some way become more conscious of the subjectivity of history and recognizes that finding an objective point of view is impossible.  This is why as we discussed in class it is so easy to find thousands of works on the same historical event.  The decision though of a wide-encompassing historical view point is up to the reader ultimately Thus the focus shouldn’t be on reforming the historical narrative process but rather on creating an educated audience that must ultimately decide which point of view or combination thereof it chooses to believe.