Narrative and Event. Reflection on Literary Historiography

Abstract

This article begins by drawing attention to the traditional differentiation between history (res gestae) and historiography (historia rerum gestarum). In the nineteenth century, the difference between these was concealed in Ranke’s programmatic formula claiming that historians must report wie es eigentlich gewesen. In this formulation, the story of history is equated with the historian’s narrative, which becomes its transparent medium. In contrast, modern and postmodern metahistoriographic criticism clearly differentiates between them, claiming at the same time that the “story” of history is nothing but a narrative fiction because emplotment is already the work of the historian’s narrative. However, this article shows that narrative or the narrated story (i.e., the work of the narrative ability as an unabolishable human feature) always exists before both historical and literary narrative, which are merely its explication. On the other hand, the event (i.e., the smallest “unit” of history) is not merely a fictitious product of narrative or something that has always existed within a language, as the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion suggests. The paradox becomes even stronger with the literary event: although this depends on the letter, it does not constitute anything linguistic by itself. The best testimony of this is provided by Longinus’ description of the soul’s elevation through a sublime wording, which is used in the article as a model for the description of the literary event. This event (i.e., the meeting of writing and reading which occurs at the wording) is ahistorical by itself because it takes place in the timelessness of the soul’s ecstatic elevation, as well as transhistorical because it comes to pass at all times. The literary-historical narrative must proceed from it as the basic tone regardless which thematic key it is written in – that is, even when it focuses not only on one literary work, but takes shape as a story of a literary period, movement, genre, and so on.