In the process of getting the ‘ literal truth’, what
gets left out is precisely those elements of figuration – tropes and figures of
thought, as the rhetoricians call them- without which the narratiion of
real events, the transformation of a chronicle into a story, could never be
effected. If there is a ‘category mistake’ involved in this literalizing
procedure, it is that of mistaking a narrative account of real events for a literal
account thereof. A narrative account is always a figurative account, an allegory.
To leave this figurative element out of consideration in the analysis of a narrative
is to miss not only its aspect as allegory, but also the performance in
language by which a chronicle is transformed into a narrative. And it is only a modern prejudice in favor of
literalism that obscures this fact to many modern analysts of historical
narrative. In any event, the dual conviction that truth must be represented in literal
statements of fact and explanation must conform to the scientific model or its
commonsensical counterpart has led most analysts to ignore the specifically
literary aspect of historical narrative and therewith whatever truth it may
convey in figurative terms. . .
For Dante, Charles Singleton wrote, ‘only God could use events as words,
causing them to point beyond themselves’ to meanings that must be construed
as being literal truths on all of their manifold levels of significance. Thus,
conceived, history, considered as a sequence of events, is God’s ‘poetry’. God
writes in events as poets write in words. This is why any history considered as
a human account of those events would be at best a translation of God’s
‘poetry’ into ‘prose,’ or what amounts to the same thing, a merely human
‘poetry. Since no poet or historian possesses God’s power, the best either
could do would be to ‘imitate God’s way of writing’ – which Dante purported to
do in the Commedia. But since this writing will always be an imitation of God’s
power to write in events, every history will always be something other than the
events of which it speaks, both in its form and content. It will be a special
kind of poetry which, in its intention to speak literally, is always
frustrated, driven to speak poetically, that is to say, figuratively, and in so
speaking to conceal what it wishes to reveal – but by concealment, conveying a
much deeper truth.
Something like this, I take it, is what Paul Ricoeur
is saying in his reflections on historical narrative – although he is saying
this indirectly, figuratively, allegorically. His is an allegory of
allegorization, intended –if I understand him, correctly- to save the moral
dimension of historical consciousness from the fallacy of false literalism and
the dangers of false objectivity.
The non-narrative manner of speaking common to the physical sciences seems more
appropriate for the representation of ‘real’ events. But here the notion of
what constitutes a real event turns, not on the distinction between true and false
(which is a distinction that belongs to the order of discourses, not to the
order of events), but rather on the distinction between real and imaginary
(which belongs both to the order of events and to the order of discourses). One
can produce an imaginary discourse about real events that my not be less true
for being imaginary. It all depends upon how one construes the function of the
faculty of imagination in human nature. . . how else can any past, which by definition
comprises events, processes, structures, and so forth, considered to be no
longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness or discourse except
in an ‘imaginary’ way? Is it not possible that the question of narrative in any
discussion of historical theory is always finally about the function of
imagination in the production of a specifically human truth?
Away then with falsely construed forbearance and vapidly effeminate taste which cast a veil over the solemn face of necessity and, in order to curry favor with the senses, counterfeit a harmony between good fortune and good behavior of which not a trace is to be found in the actual world. . . We are aided [in the attainment of this point of view] by the terrifying spectacle of change which destroys everything and creates it anew, and destroys again . . .We are aided by the pathetic spectacle of mankind wrestling with fate, the irresistible elusiveness of happiness,confidence betrayed, unrighteousness triumphant and innocence laid low; of these history supplies ample instances, and tragic art imitates them before our eyes.- Schiller
This could have been written by Nietzsche
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