Literature and History: Riddles in Space and Time

Russian Literature XXXII (1992) 417-438 North-Holland

LITERATURE AND HISTORY: RIDDLES IN SPACE AND TIME

DMITRI SEGAL

I

This article is a response to some of the challenges posed by V.N. To- porov’s writings on the semiotic problems connected with what he sees as a transition from the mythopoetic mode of thinking to history. The basic idea first suggested by Toporov in his path-breaking article ‘From Cosmology to History” firmly places him alongside such philosophers of history of the 1930-1940s as R.G. Collingwood and K. Jaspers. In fact, Toporov was the first in contemporary Soviet scholarship to suggest that the ideas of these two great thinkers might have some relevance to the development of the new field of the semiotics of history. This article was followed by other studies in which Toporov closely examined the very basis of historic inquiry, namely the question-and-answer method expounded by the first great historiographers.

The following is an attempt at bridging some of the problems examined by Toporov and some of the inquiries of present-day theoretic historiography.

The problem referred to in the title of this paper includes diverse aspects of the complex interrelationship between the two semantic axes: literature and history.

On the one hand, historical writing is literature. Moreover, it shares very important structural characteristics with fiction, especially narrative fiction. Insofar as it includes the category of time, fiction is not unlike historical narrative. Finally, literature, as we all know, is part of that larger

1992 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.

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history, the one which is being played out rather than written, while this very history is the subject matter, the living body of history.

On the other hand, it would not do justice to one’s conventional intuition to leave history and fiction undifferentiated if only for one basic reason: deep in one’s heart one yearns to learn the unadulterated truth about ‘what really happened’ (or, as the historians say, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.. . ‘).

I am well aware that much of what I am about to say is not only well known but has repeatedly been held up as the basis for the development of proper epistemology in historiography (and, more recently, in literary criticism, especially by the hermeneuticians). I have two things to say in my defense: firstly, that some truths, even if repeated very often, do not become trivial (at least not to the present author), and secondly, that even if the substance of my paper and certain examples are not new, my arrange- ment of the topics might prove not to be such old hat after all.

It would, of course, be presumptuous to suggest global guidelines for treating fictional writing versus historiographic writing for the simple reason that viewed over the millennia of their joint existence these two forms of writing are often indistinguishable. Let me give three examples:

Example 1

Dans ce livre les bateaux naviguent, les vagues repktent leur chansons; les vignerons descendent des collines des Cinque terre, sur la Riviera genoise; les olives sont gaulees en Provence et en Grece; les pecheurs tirent leurs filets sur la lagune immobile de Venise ou dans les canaux de Djerba; les charpentiers construisent des barques pareilles aujourd’hui a celles d’hier.. . (P. Braudel [ed.], La Mkfjterranke, vol. I, L’espace et I ‘histoire. Paris 1977-1978: 1)

The evocative, poetic nature of this style (occurring as it does in a major work written according to theoretical precepts of a major school of historiography) is so evident that it hardly needs any commentary. It permeates not only the syntactic structure of the text (numerous parallel- isms, repetitions, crescendos and diminuendos) and its semantic level (free use of metaphors and metonymies), but its phonetic texture as well (e.g., “naviguent [. . .] les vagues; leur chansons [. . .] les vignerons; vignerons [. . .] cofhes”, etc.

An even more striking feature of this text is a wide use of all these devices well beyond the ‘Introduction’ in analytical, discursive passages where they function as an important part of a purely epistemological (ex- planatory, ‘proof-bearing’) mechanism. At the same time I suppose that

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professional historians regard this text as an example of historical writing rather than purely literary and imaginative.

Example2

The story of Croesus (Kroisos) from Book I of Herodotus. The plot is treated by the author, in certain central moments, in terms of what we now know are traditional motifs of oral folk literature (e.g., ‘prohibition - breaking of prohibition’ as in the story of Kandaulis and Gygis; ‘prophecy - fulfillment of prophecy’, concerning Croesus himself; ‘test connected with correct answers to clever questions’, as in the confrontation between Croesus and Solon the wise; etc., etc.). At the same time it is universally recognized that Herodotus’ text, with all its folkloristic qualities, is the beginning of historical writing.

Example 3

What force is it that moves the nations? Historians of particular biographies and particular nations understand this force as a power inherent in heroes and rulers. Judging by their descriptions events are put in motion exclusively by the will of Napoleons or Alexanders or any other such persons whom a historian of particularities describes. Answers provided by historians of this persuasion to a question concerning the force that moves the events would be satisfactory only if one historian alone existed to describe this or another particular event. However, no sooner than historians of different nationalities and persuasions start describing the same event their answers lose all sense whatsoever, because the force in question is understood by each and every one of them not only differently but, as often as not, in a totally opposite way. One historian asserts that a particular event was caused by the power exercised by Napoleon, another insists that it was caused by the power exercised by Alexander, the third one, that it was caused by the power of some third person. (An excerpt from Ch. 2, p. II, vol. 4 of Tolstoj’s WarandPeace [Tr. mine - D.S.].)

This passage is easily recognized for what it is, namely, an excerpt from Lev Tolstoj’s treatise on the nature of history and historical writing incorporated into WarandPeace. The style and argumentation are those of a XIXth century historian (as is well known, Tolstoj studied the historical works of Thiers and Guizot for critical purposes).

I know only too well that these examples prove one thing, and one thing alone, namely, that our intuition (or knowledge) of the nature of historical and fictional writing is based on criteria which are not purely stylistic, linguistic, or even substantive. Thus, while there are historical treatises

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written in the manner and tradition in which such treatises are expected to be written (true, say, for the period between Gibbon and Gilbert) and while there are works of imaginative literature that immediately strike us as fiction, there are no less distinguished cases of mixing of rules, disregard of conventions and creation of new rules.

What is the basis of this intuition or knowledge? Merely the fact that we know that Plutarch or Thucydides are widely recognized as forefathers of historical writing (but are they not as widely regarded as prominent prose stylists?)? What then about Suetonius? Yes, indeed, what about Suetonius? - my intuition (maybe wide off the mark!) tells me that De Vita, in some very important aspects, is a mixture of historical and imaginative writing.

Please note that my three examples were in fact excerpfs from a larger whole. It is this knowledge of the larger whole, of the genre affiliation of each work, which allows us with relative ease to refer each text to one or the other category. However, is not our knowledge of genre a product of a later literary critical and aesthetic tradition? Again, what about mixed genres, or multiple genre affiliations, especially in cases of anthologies or anthologies of anthologies or when certain texts whose genre classification is fairly straightforward (e.g., epic texts of the Old Norse tradition) also happen to be the only (or at least very important) source for possible historical conclusions?

II

In order to avoid a somewhat circular way of reasoning inherent in any recourse to genre or tradition (‘something is history because it is called “history”‘) let me again take refuge in an example.

I have in mind two versions of the story of the sack of Rabbat-Ammon by Yoav and his army, one in II Samuel (Ch. 11) and the other in I Chronicles (Ch. 20). There is an important difference between these two variants (which both begin with almost identical statements - the square brackets contain the I Chronicles version):

And it was [at the time of] the return of the year, at the time when the kings go forth.. .

As is well known, the crucial difference between the two variants of the story of the sack of Rabbat-Ammon is that the II Samuel variant is not a story about the sack of Rabbat-Ammon at all. It is the famous story of David, Bat-Sheva, and David’s perfidy towards his faithful servant Uriah the Hittite. The story of the sack of Rabbat-Ammon in II Samuel is, as we


would now say, a narrative frame into which the beautiful and tragic love story is embedded. In contrast, in I Chronicles this is the whole story and Bat-Sheva is only referred to elsewhere in the book (as Bat-Shu’a, the mother of Shlomo, I Chronicles, 3: 5). I do not intend to claim that one version (i.e., I Chronicles) represents, as it were, pure ‘historical’ writing while the other represents pure ‘fiction’ (why fiction? How do we know that the story of David and Bat-Sheva did not happen, or alternatively, that Rabbat-Ammon was in fact sacked?). What I do want to say is that in both cases we have to deal with a different text-building dominant (or ideological dominant, as one may have it) which imposes certain choices upon the author (narrator/redactor) of the text. How can one test these choices?

It seems to me that it can be profitably done in the context of what Michail Bachtin referred to as a time-space artistic unity of the work, or its artistic chronotopos.

Going back to our example, we would do well, then, to pay attention to the fact that I Chronicles operates in a completely different time-space scale than II Samuel (even if we take into account that the passages in I Chronicles devoted to David are, as it were, an expansion of the accepted time-space scale of the text and thus occupy a larger place than their ‘true’ chronological niche). In Chronicles the time-space scale is that of the entire existence of the human race. It begins with “Adam, Shet, Enosh.. .“, it is definitely not biographical, neither is it epic, nor personage-oriented. The dominant here is the forward-directed time streaming forth from the time of the first Adam towards the time of the Persian Cyrus who ordered the building of the House of the Lord and the release of all those who worship the Lord. Evidently, the present of the creation of the text as well as its future should be included in the time-scale of I Chronicles.

If one examines the spatial model present in the text one is impressed by its complete subordination to the time-model, something which is quite extreme even for the prosaic narrative parts of the Hebrew Scriptures. The text charts only the principal spatial coordinates with Jerusalem and Mt. Zion being the semantic and sacral center of this chronotopos; however, other possible relevant coordinates are highly attenuated. Who, then, is the hero (or, perhaps, the organism) whose time-space evolves before our eyes? It is the same hero whose fate we follow through all other parts of the Hebrew Bible - the Nation of Israel. However, with regard to I Chronicles this statement carries much more real weight and is backed up by real substantive evidence: there are virtually no mediators in this time- space, no biographies, no attention to minor or important details of description of character or fate. Everything in the narrative is subordinated to the description of the fate of the nation and problems faced and solved by it-with Divine help.

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If this scheme of things is correct it is clear why the story of David and Bat-Sheva was not included in I Chronicles: it dealt with something other than the problems which faced the collective Nation of Israel. It came from a different chronotopos.

Let me now try to characterize this time-space in some additional aspects. Two of these I have already mentioned: a) unidirectionality and grand scale of time with present and future included; and b) the very general nature of a space model which is completely subordinated to that of time. Since the body responsible for this chronotopos is the collective body of the nation, it is clear that in this time-space model there will be problems with the character or the nature of the ‘hero’. The hero is by definition multiple (note numerous instances of counting the nation, arranging it in thousands, hundreds, tens); ‘he’ cannot be isolated as one personage, one character. These have to be literally hundreds, if not thousands, of names, thousands of heroes, each solving both his own and collective problems, often in conflict with others (note the theme of conf7ict as central for this chronotopos; is it not remarkable that the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides both began with stating as the reason for their existence the desire to relate the true causes and circumstances of a conflict - ‘polemos’?). Therefore this chronotopos is often characterized by a very peculiar narrative scheme: unlike in narrative fit tion, one very often misses here the element of globality, final resolution; narration is very often non- cumulative, the story ends in a half-sentence, as it were.

But if the hero is multiple and the narration proceeds in short bursts then another conclusion can be made about this time-space: it is an assem- blage of individual, particular chronotopoi, often narratively unconnected. The general time-space is often too general, too abstract to be able to provide an ‘organic’ narrative scheme which would account for each atomized chronotopos.

In Tolstoj’s words, what is then the force which propels this multiple hero, and each individual ‘owner’ of each ‘micro-chronotopos’, along the axis of unidirectional time? There are numerous ideological answers to this question. In our particular case the principal clue is the realization of the Lord’s design. However, on a purely relational level this force seems to be the necessity to solve concrete problems, to overcome difficult situations. In other words, each chronotopos within the general time-space we are discussing is a condensed problem (e.g., now there is a problem of the Ammonites, now there is a problem of the Philistines, now there is a problem of a plague due to David’s mistake or sin, etc., etc.). The problem is presented in an explicit way and the solution (positive or, sometimes, negative) is related. Here the main modality seems to be ‘how’.

Here I wish to claim that what I have just listed are the necessary and essential properties of the historical chronotopos as they appear not only in


Chronicles but in virtually all other texts which claim to be historical writings:

grand scale and unidirectionality of time inclusion of the present and the future collective, multiple nature of the ‘hero’ centrality of the motif of conflict absence of an ‘organic’ unifying chronotopos overall time-space and narrative consist of many individual chronotopoi and narratives that may be assembled only with difficulty subordination of space-model to time-model problem-solving as the central mechanism of each individual narrative unit and of the entire ‘narrative’.

Several remarks have to be made at this point:

1. I do not claim that each individual feature does not occur elsewhere in other artistic chronotopoi. What I do claim is that historical chronotopos is characterized by the sum total of these features occurring together.

Thus, the grand scale of time is well represented in the mythical and epic chronotopos. However, in these time-space models time is viewed as cyclic, the present and the future may be present or absent, not to mention the necessary sense of borders between these chronotopoi and the present.

On the other hand, the feeling of grand time is necessary for any historical chronotopos, even taken in its most particularized, atomized (or provincial!) version. The history of a village becomes history rather than ethnography when it is related to the framework of grand time.

The point about the multiple nature of the hero is also valid for any historical chronotopos, even the one that deals with historical biographies, although here the borderline between historic and fictional writing is easily crossed. The dominant element here is whether the narrative is organized according to the ‘problem-solving’ mode or not.

The problem-solving dominant introduces the hero of an historical biography as someone who acts within the grand time-scale aiding the multiple hero (a nation, a class, a professional group, a movement, etc.) move along this scale.

2. I certainly do not claim that the historical chronotopos is synonymous with historiographic writing. The latter implies heuristic and epistemological procedures (checking of sources, establishing their provenance, their pragmatics, etc., etc.) which are a necessary basis for a science of history. I would, however, make a weaker claim, namely that minute seeds of some historiographic procedures are, in a way, planted in the historic

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chronotopos itself. It should follow from the multiple nature of the ‘owner’ of the time-scale as well as from the ‘assembled’ nature of the time-space itself. Chronicles may be compiled to reflect a synthetic dynastic or ideological viewpoint, however incompatible with the problem- solving direction within each particular chronotopos. But be this as it may, multiplicity of viewpoints with the concomitant necessity of checking them and their sources against each other (or even censoring them in the light of the prevailing dogma) is implicit in the very structure of the historical chronotopos with its fascination with actions of men and women and the consequences thereof, and is a far cry from a ‘natural’ ‘organic’ unity of viewpoint in ‘mythic’ or ‘epic’ chronotopos.

3. The intrinsic presence of a multitude of viewpoints in the historical chronotopos finds its correspondence, on a different level, in the centrality of the theme of conf7ict. Here one must examine, however briefly, the ideology of conflict, its reasons as expounded, implicitly or explicitly, in the Hebrew Chronicles and the Greek historians. To sum up: behind the multitude of different viewpoints lies human inadequacy, human inability to know the truth; behind the conflict lies a similar human inadequacy and inability to fathom the correct consequences of one’s acts. In other words, the historical chronotopos begins with the realization that imperfect men (and women) are the only vehicle for the manifestation of a higher purpose.

However, as the narrator’s eyes are fixed on this faraway point of a ‘higher purpose’, the historical point of view, the historical chronotopos, remains outside the narrator’s scope. The formulation of a ‘higher purpose’ belongs to other semiotic domains: myth, religion, ideology. As such lessons of this kind may enter the historian’s province, but only as a non-historical framework, like Herodotus’ scheme of hybtis -Ate, or the Hebrew Chronicles’ sin -punishment.

The interesting problem is whether there is any ‘lesson’, any meaning- ful sequence in the inner structure of the historical chronotopos itself. Without trying to give a solution to this problem, let me quote a recent informed opinion on Herodotus and Thucydides:

[. . .] Nothing appealed to Herodotus and Tbucydides more than surprises, particularly tragic surprises of history. Paradoxically, their emphasis upon such incongruities, sometimes even their literary enhancement of them, creates a pattern or theme in the two histories.2

The author’s view of Thucydides further elucidates this point:


Thucydides is constantly forcing the reader to observe contrasts, to go beyond the surface in order to extract meaning on his own, and, at least to some degree, of his own. Cunning understatement, even at times the unspoken word, give a reader pause, raise a doubt, create a slight discomfort: are appearances deceiving? The answer which careful readers of Tbucydides feel instinctively, is invariably-yes.3

4. My final remark concerns the problem of the status of the chronotopos, a problem which should be treated by philosophers rather than literary critics or historians. I realize that to postulate a historical, or a mythic or an epic, chronotopos is in a way tantamount to postulating historical (mythic, epic, etc.) consciousness (resp. existence, structure of society, etc.). If this should be so, what have I achieved apart from shifting the problem of definition into a different domain?

I believe that the notion of chronotopos has certain advantages which, however tentative and tenuous, allow one to use it as a convenient term which introduces some clarity and provides some useful additional distinctions:

it is, similarly to the characteristics of space and time in natural objects, almost a measurable system which finds its expression in definable characteristics and behavior; unlike consciousness or existence, chronotopos is not a global, overall description with its overtones of givenness, finality, inescapability; chronotopos is a semiotic system which leaves its ‘owner’ more freedom of orientation than does existence; being a semiotic system, chronotopos may be observed both from within and without, i.e., experienced and manipulated, unlike consciousness (or existence) which dominates or engulfs the subject (or rather object); chronotopos is manifested in texts which are already pre-structured, thus facilitating the discovery of time-space relationships,

An important aspect of the status of chronotopos (and, especially, historical chronotopos) is its historicity. The features of the historical chronotopos occur in this configuration only after a certain chronological divide about the exact location and geographical distribution of which I do not presume to speculate.

Another relevant aspect of the status of the chronotopos is its relationship with other chronotopoi, be it within the confines of one text, or outside of it, within one tradition or across traditions.

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Of the many possible problems which arise here several are worth mentioning without elaboration:

relationship between historical chronotopos, as presented here, and various forms of what may variously be referred to as ‘traditional’, ‘chronistic’, ‘authoritative’, ‘prescriptive’, ‘legendary’ chronotopos which seems to be characterized by a tendency towards unification of the hero, nanative and time-space, in the direction of the epic but not necessarily going the whole way. relationship between historical chronotopos and such time-space models as private (or semi-private) memorization, memorates as folk genres, etc. It is at this point that Suetonius’ De Vita.. . comes to mind with its wonderful mixture of historical, public and private, anecdotal reporting. the cardinal and often discussed4 problem of the relationship between the historical and the narrative which should be reformulated as the problem of the interrelationship of the chronotopic dominants within one text.

But at this point where the historical and the fictional intersect let me return to my example.

III

Let us recall the beginning of the story of David and Bat-Sheva:

And it was at the return of the year at the time when the kings go forth [to war], and David sent Yoav and his servants with him and all Israel, and they destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, and David sat in Jerusalem.

And it was toward the time of the evening and David arose from above his couch and was walking upon the roof of the king’s house, and he saw from above the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very fair to look upon. And David sent and inquired about the woman, and [someone] said, Is that one not Bat-Sheva, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite? And David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her, and she had just purified herself from her uncleanliness, and she returned to her house. And the woman conceived, and she sent and spoke unto David, saying, I am with child.

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Even from this introduction one notices certain well-known and characteristic features of this non-historical ‘fictional’ or ‘imaginative’ chronotopos. In this particular example one is struck by a sudden transition from a grand time-scale to a very specific, individualized, minutely featured tie-scale, a transition which reminds us of a sudden switch of cinematographic planes: from a very long shot to a close-up: “And it was at the return of the year at the time when the kings go forth”, “And it was towards the time of the evening”.

The hero is definitely individual andindividualized. Other protagonists are individualized as well, especially Uriah the Hittite. In the comparison between the two texts (II Samuel and I Chronicles) one is especially impressed by the prominence and plastic nature of the space-model in the II Samuel story. Note the emphatic nature of the ‘up-down’ semantic opposition: “upon the roof of the king’s house”; “from above his couch”; “and he saw from above the roof’, as well as the insistence of the text on spelling out precisely the spatial relations of ‘inside/outside’ with special emphasis on the semantic role of tie threshold.

And Uriah went out of the king’s palace, and after him went out the king’s presents. And Uriab lay at the entrance to the king’s palace with all the servants of his lord, and he did not go down [descend] to his house.

If anything, the spatial component of the chronotopos is the more prominent here.

And finally, there is an ‘organic’ chronotopos unifying all the various episodes of the II Samuel text. It is the biography of David, King of Israel. The determination of the exact nature of this chronotopos should be a task for Biblical scholars; suffice it to say that one does not find its characterization in Bachtin’s monograph which dealt largely with forms of time- space which contributed to the emergence of the chronotopos of the modern novel. I might venture to suggest that it is a very complex time- space with evidence of time-space models of epic, psychological prose, paradigmatic (normative) biography, poetic diction existing side by side with historical chronotopos. Probably one should classify it as a special genre of Biblical royal biography.

In the chapter to which we refer, however, it is the historical time- space which is the weakest. On what grounds have I come to this conclusion?

If in the characterization of the historical time-space the text-building dominant was problem resolution, here this aspect is clearly not dominant. However, it is not clear, as it was in the historical chronotopos, what the problem actually is. Are we invited to marvel at King David’s skill in

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sending off his lover’s husband to a sure death? Or is it Yoav who is solving a problem of how to combine communicating desirable news to his king with telling him about something for which he might be punish- ed? To be sure, both these problem-solving motifs are present, but it seems to me that, important as they may be in themselves, their significance emerges in the light of a completely different semantic plane. If in the historical chronotopos the narrative modality is how, here it is what. What is going on here? What is the problem? What is the solution? The whole pattern is, as it were, mixed up, and the reader is expected to find the picture which was mixed up. The dominant paradigm here is the riddle and not the problem.

What exactly is the riddle (or riddles) in this chapter? I would suggest a very banal question: “What is Ring David doing?’ And the answer to this riddle is not really as simple as it appears from the chapter itself and from its sequel in which David’s punishment and atonement are related. First of all, why is this question in itself a riddle? I suppose, for several reasons.

The story appears in mediasres, nothing in the immediate narrative line prepares us for it. So the riddle is, why should it be told at all and why here? Then, although the reader knows about the complexity of King David’s character, this story is too much even for him. Thus the riddle is: What is the hidden purpose of all this? Does this episode have some ‘higher purpose’? And what about the riddle of the actual relationship? Is it just lust or more than that (as we are given to understand in the sequel)? For the child who survives is born out of David’s pity for Bat-Sheva:

And David comforted Bat-Sheva his wife, and went to her, and lay with her, and she bore a son, and he called his name Shlomo, and the Lord loved him.

It is my thesis that there is a world of difference between the mode of problem resolution in a historical narrative and the mode of discovering riddles in an ‘imaginative’ fictional narrative.

Let me remark once again that in the historical chronotopos problems are explicit, their resolution (or even the impossibility of their resolution) is also explicit and this is what forms the dominant of the text.

In the ‘imaginative’ chronotopos it is the dominant of the text to point at implicitriddles whose solution is often either irrelevant or impossible or delayed. The “joy of the text” (R. Barthes) here is a discovery that the picture is different from what may be gathered from previous semantic information. This is a necessary condition of any ‘imaginative’ chronotopos. In other words, while in the historical chronotopos problems should be solved (or as historians say, historical facts, events and configurations


should be explained), in the fictional chronotopos it is not at all necessary to solve the riddle, it is necessary, though, to find it and present it to the reader.

That this is th_e principle of any ‘imaginative’ narrative was clear already to Viktor Sklovskij. In one of his earliest essays (‘The_Mystery Novella’, published in his On the Theory of Prose in 1929), Sklovskij insists that the principle of riddle underlies any plot construction. His conception of riddle is very general, and may be linked to the notion of semanticgapprominently used now in text interpretation.

One may build the narrative in such a way that the action would be opaque, that the story will be full of ‘mysteries’ solved only later.

Further on Sklovskij points out:

Riddle is not simply a parallelism with the second part of the parallelism omitted, but it is a play on the possibility, in principle, to have many parallels.

I would expand Sklovskij’s use of the notion of riddle beyond the plot level and suggest that ultimately any detail in the ‘imaginative’ chronotopos may function as a riddle to be found and interpreted.

Thus, the distinction between the historical and the imaginative may also be subsumed under the contrast: ‘explanation’ - ‘semantization’ (‘interpretation’).

And finally, to illustrate the epistemological difference between the problem and the riddle, let me give an example.

In the sense that I use it, riddle is not necessarily something which has to be concealed by the author and guessed by the reader. It is the modality of the time-space, a sort of anticipation with which we approach the text.

Thus, when presenting a well-known episode from Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime career which deals with the British ‘Enigma’ opera- tion, whose success was in cracking German army codes, the historian - in this case Churchill himself - may be forced to put a cloak of silence over the entire topic; however, he would have to provide other alternative and explicit explanations for British military and political actions during the war. Churchill variously explained British military successes which derived from a prior knowledge of German field orders by his own intuition, by German stupidity, etc. A modem historian writing a definitive biography of Churchill could already explicitly analyse the role of ‘Enig- ma’. He could thus provide other explanations for the same historical facts. In both instances the historical chronotopos presents British efforts as successive problems which were to be solved by the Cabinet or the prime

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minister or the generals. It is just that the solution mechanism differs depending on the historian’s knowledge of the facts.

The writer’s vision of the same episode would be completely different, even in the case of the most pedestrian attempt to reconstruct the story of ‘Enigma’ as a historic event not in the historical but in the ‘imaginative’ chronotopos. All the intricate mechanism of riddle-building, like suspense, quidpro quo, tension between fabula and sjuzet, introduction of ‘meaning- ful’ details, description of places and realia, chronological games like flashbacks, the use of a poslen’oti knowledge in the narrative, play on the tension between literary character, personage and narrative function, montage, use of voices, fictional use of dialogues and direct speech, etc., etc. - all these would create a time-space model which would force the reader to ask the basic question: what is really going on? Are my perceptions correct? And to react, in the case of the writer’s success, “Oh, that is what it really is!“, “Oh, that is what it was all about!” And this is exactly the effect of the ‘riddle’ in the Shklovskian sense - the discovery of a semantic parallel.

From what I have said it does not follow that historical narrative, or any narrative, cannot make use of some (or all) of the above-mentioned ‘fictional’ devices (or others not mentioned here). The crucial difference would be that in a historical chronotopos they should be subordinated to the main dominant of ‘problem-solving’, they would belong to the back- ground, while in the ‘imaginative’ chronotopos they are the dominant. I would even venture to say that to the extent that there am literary ‘riddles’ in the historian’s narrative this historian would not be true to his profession.

I am well aware that in recent years it has become fashionable to demystify the rhetorical devices used by historians, and it is good that historians should become aware of the significative possibilities and burdens of the narrative constructions they are using. However, this demystification would miss its point if it were to assert that because of the use of narrative devices there is no difference between fiction and historical writing. Ordinary people like myself, and not only poets, occasionally use rhymes too; this, however, does not make our babblings poetry.

Now I would like to dwell briefly on the most important problem which is traditionally postulated as setting historical writing apart from fiction, the problem of historical truth versus fictionality. For after all, do we not all know that history realZy happened while fiction did not? And no amount of effort to assert the opposite - for instance, the well-known dictum that Don Quixote is more real than actual historical figures of the same period - would change this basic fact. If anything, the feeling that somebody or something from the past is real should be a good indication that they belong to a fictional world.

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I do not think that it is too difficult to relate the notions of historical truth and fictiondity to the corresponding historical and ‘imaginative’ chronotopoi respectively, at least in their most typical, classical examples. Firstly, one has to take into account the stated orientation of the two domains: to discover historical truth and present it objectively in historiography, and to represent its world with the utmost skill in fiction. One has to be tnre, the other - at least in the mimetic version - not true but like, verisimilar, real, etc. Secondly, one cannot ignore the very important element of the audience response to historical writing versus fiction: people trust their historians and believe their writers (or so they should, at least in theory!).

However, these considerations are not really important to me. What is much more important is the intrinsic character of the two chronotopoi. I would begin by saying that firstly, the nature of the historical chronotopos is such that generally speaking it is very difficult for a historian to be skilfully untrue (for that, one needs a whole army of historians, an entire establishment); secondly, I would submit that the ‘imaginative’ chronotopos is the more natural, spontaneous, of the two.

I know that I am immediately making myself open to a very easy attack and refutation, especially in the first part of my statement - do we not all know of examples of outright lies by historians, like the infamous writings by the ‘historians’ who seek to ‘prove’ that the Jewish Catastrophe of the 1930-1940s never took place! But it is precisely through such examples that my point is made clearer. Because of the ‘non-organic’, ‘non-unified’, ‘multiple’ nature of the historical chronotopos these quasi-historians need to make a special effort to imitate the historical chronotopos - to refute well-known documents, to falsify documents, to invent non-existent facts, to produce false witnesses, multitudes of actors have to be forgotten and new actors invented in their stead - and all this is very difficult. Historio- graphy cannot be imitated that easily without leaving traces of falsification. One cannot coordinate in one’s imagination the equivalent of the actions, thoughts, reactions, communications, etc., of tens of thousands of real actors who own and produce a real historical time-space.

This is why falsifiers either produce texts which very easily betray their imaginative chronotopos (incidentally, such texts are often quite excit- ing to read), or occupy themselves with certain circumscribed fragments of history which they wish to rewrite. Such fragments, as often as not, are the earliest stages of the history of a particular nation.

One such example is more recent and it involves fabrications by some anti-communist Russian emigres in the 1950-1960s of purportedly authentic Old Russian pagan texts which, along with supplying all the missing material about the old Slavic pagan religion, of which very little is

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reliably known, backdates the history of the Russians to the time of the ancient Sumerians!

Here I approach a fascinating subject - pro domo mea. If, as I have attempted to suggest, it should be easy to distinguish between the historical and the imaginative chronotopoi, and difficult to fake the historical chronotopos convincingly, how is one to relate to the decades-old travails of official Soviet historiography which has been practicing the art of historio- graphical mendacity in broad daylight?

I admit that this is a very tough nut to crack methodologically. On the one hand, every normal person, even one with the most superficial knowledge of Russian life and history in the last two centuries, can see very easily that in Soviet official historiography a very painstaking and exten- sive job has been done of deleting from history the most prominent historical facts and figures. On the other hand, the productions of this historiography are, on the whole, very good imitations of the historical chronotopos. Does this disprove my initial thesis? I do not think so, and for two reasons.

First, the success of faking depended on the fact that it was institution- alized, normative and regulatory, and involved significant numbers of practitioners who were unaware that faking was taking place.

Second, no faking is ever perfect, so there were frequent instances of the miscoordination of dates, names, facts and sources. Often forbidden names did appear due to editorial oversight, etc.

But with this we approach another intersection: history, literahxe, and life.

IV

So far, we have spoken of the problems of historical and fictional writing mainly on the level of text-generation, text-structure, whereas one may argue that whenever history is mentioned real problems begin when one tries to trace its relationship to the so-called ‘stream of real events’ -life.

I have been dealing with some such problems at the end of the previous section and one was mentioned explicitly but left aside: I claimed that ‘imaginative’ chronotopos is produced more ‘naturally’, ‘spontaneously’ than historical chronotopos.

I will not be able to explore this point in detail; I will only refer the audience to the two sources of my thought: the classical treatise by R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Ilistory, which I condense into what seems to me a hermeneutically relevant statement - that the problem of History as action, res gestae, may be understood only when we realize that it is derivative from or depends on our own conception of history, the idea of


history, historia rerum ges&rum. What follows from this line of thinking is a recognition of the historicity of history. Then the historical chronotopos appears as a later development, a product of deliberate elaboration and efforts, just as, according to Collingwood (and others, including K. Jas- pers), the idea of history is a novel idea, a new acquisition by humankind. Thus, a necessary level of meta-thinking, thinking about thinking, should be achieved in order to enter historical space-time.

Another source of the idea of the ‘spontaneity’ of the imaginative chronotopos is in the studies (mostly empirical) of what is now known as ‘text-grammar’, and further on, of the algorithms of purposeful behavior in artificial intelligence. These studies show that texts which are generated by speakers spontaneously already possess very complex narrative or quasi- narrative structures, even at the level of the sentence. These structures are based on the phenomenon parallel to the distinction between the chronological narrative sequence (fabula) and the reported sequence (sjuZet) in ‘imaginative’ narrative texts, namely on the heteromorphism of logical and linguistic syntax: logical subject and predicate (or ‘thema’ and ‘rhema’) are not necessarily syntactic and vice versa.

This phenomenon coexists side by side with the phenomena of emphasis, foregrounding, ellipsis which may be effected by various linguistic means - syntactic, semantic or supra-segmental (intonation, pause, hesitation, etc.).

Quite structured narrative frameworks are found in connected texts and spontaneous narratives (‘memorates’). If one were to look for texts without such narrative framework (i.e., without: suspense, ‘zooming’, surprise, posing of riddles and their resolution, climaxing, crescendo and diminuen- do, etc.), one would have to go to ‘non-spontaneous’, ‘especially elabor- ated’ examples, like texts of inventories, etc.

There appears to be a narrative in the Greimasian structure in algorithms of purposeful behavior, something akin to the well-known ‘Exposi- tion (Vorgeschichte)-Impulse-Reaction-return to Exposition-Adjustment- Conclusion(Nachgeschichte)‘scheme.

Certain theoreticians of history (especially those indebted to herme- neutics) postulate a necessarily causal link between narrative forms in texts and the corresponding structures ‘in reality’. Thus, David Carr in his recent article5 makes a very interesting, though somewhat speculative, case for the narrativity of the real world. According to Carr, the Annalistes, while discovering very fruitful modes of historical research and writing, did so in spite of the fallacy of their initial premise, namely that narrativity distorts reality. Not so, asserts Cat-r: real life is as intrinsically organized as is narrative, and its organization is akin to that of the narrative; just as in narrative, so in reality there are plots, especially in active life; reality is not an open-ended stream but is characterized by closure; ordinary action is

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not a chaos of unrelated items; the narrator’s ironic voice corresponds in reality to a person’s ability to think of his life as separate from its immediate experiencing.

This digression into the spontaneous nature of narrativity and its role in our perception of reality was needed to establish another classificatory category, namely that of ‘assertive’, ‘laudatory’, ‘apologetic’ or ‘heroic’ chronotopos, which very often coexists side by side with historical chronotopos, sometimes running parallel to it, sometimes preceding it, sometimes emerging in its stead. My point is that this time-space model emerges as a result of the ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’ narrativity which I have just mentioned and the influence of the social, existential or teleological dimension. In other words, a question has finally to be asked: “‘Why? What is the purpose of it all?’

Here the highly charged fields of the social role of historical and fictional writing open before the researcher. I must immediately stipulate that I use the term ‘social’ in a somewhat broad manner. When I spoke about historical and imaginative chronotopoi, with the concomitant mecha- nisms of problem-solving and riddle-posing, the semiotic model of the addressee (reader) was purely textual - i.e., whatever programmatic power the text exerted over the reader was directed through the text towards the reader and back from the reader to the text, the two basic reaction modes being intellectual and aesthetic understanding; now, however, the semiotic model of the addressee is completely different. It is at this stage that one begins to speak of fictional and historical writing as of two different secondary modeling semiotic systems. Thus, the term social subsumes all dimensions of the addressee’s reactions to the text that do not go back to the text but are directed rather at him (her) self, at the social (national, etc.) group or a conception thereof, at the world, at life, etc.

The definition of the secondary modeling potentials of historical versus fictional writing is a huge task, definitely beyond the scope of this paper.

But at this point I would like to return to my example. The two previous modes with which we tested the story of the sack of Rabbat- Ammon and David and Bat-Sheva were how and what. Now I should like to introduce the third mode which is basic to the functioning of the secondary modeling systems and which necessarily involves the personal ‘I’ of the author/reader: “Why? ” “Why did David send Uriah to his death?‘, “Why did Uriah behave the way he did?‘, or a more general question directed at the outcome of the story: “Why does it have to be this way, why should there be so much death and suffering and humiliation in order that Shlomo be born?” Finally, a question which may be asked about the story of David, Bat-Sheva and Uriah could be : “Why does it cause me so much pain and wonderment to read about all this?”


If the previous modalities were problem and riddle, this one is mystery. The chronotopos that gives birth to mystery may variously be characterized as metaphysical, existential, personal.

It should be emphasized that the discovery of this particular time-space does not mean that chronotopic moments of this nature do not occur in historical or imaginative time-space models; on the contrary, they most certainly do. The historian may and perhaps should try to probe into mysteries but only after his main task has been fulfilled and the historical sequence is laid bare, with all the problems solved, explained, illuminated. Otherwise what the reader is exposed to is nothing but the historian’s private convictions.

And, of course, imaginative literature is our richest source of mysteries, but not only literature, life itself, life as it is being lived by myself is the source of the deepest, most unfathomable, disturbing and wonderful mysteries.

The term secondary modeling system implies some kind of inter- mediate position of the semiotic system between language, which is the primary modeling system, and man. The secondary modeling system presents to man the model of the world (or a fragment thereof) as fashioned by the specific semiotic means of this particular model. But it also produces various and multiple programs according to which man is able to change himself, programs which are adaptive, teleological, imaginative, morphogenetic, etc., etc.

It is here, in the sphere of secondary modeling, that one observes significant distinctions between the above-mentioned chronotopic modes. To put it quite plainly, historical chronotopos in its pure form is a very weak programmatic mechanism. In other words, historical writing as such does not change men, or changes them very little.

There is absolutely no comparison between modeling semiotic roles of imaginative literature and historical writing.

The programmatic function is dominant in the apologetic, laudatory or heroic chronotopos, as it is in the mythical chronotopos. There seems to be an interesting continuity from mythic space-time to heroic space-time, with an extremely high degree of the programmatic semiotic modeling exercized by texts over men, as its main feature.

A historical space-time model and historical writing set themselves apart from mythic and laudatory models in that they possess no regulatory force.

However (and this is perhaps the most intriguing feature of our subject), the historical chronotopos is not just another mode of space-time perception. It is much more than that. For reasons best elucidated by the historians themselves, historical modeling of reality became the dominant mode of secondary semiotic modeling in the 16-19th centuries. Thus,

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historical writing emerged as a paradigm for other species of writing. This is well known in the history of ideas as the primacy of historicism when such fields as geological history, natural history, history of the evolution, etc., appear as dominant forms and paradigms for arranging empirical data. Note that the explosion of historicism is accompanied by the flowering of historical and quasi-historical forms of modeling reality in imaginative literature, note the role of literature as presenting a vivid picture of contemporary social history in the realism and naturalism of the nineteenth century. It should be instructive to study the influence of various forms of history-oriented writing on the formation of behavior, character and tem- perament types and patterns, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, cf. the dominant role of historical writing in the building. up of popular pictures of history as it becomes crystallized in painting, archi- tecture, journalism, political thinking, etc.

All this is too well known to dwell on in detail. Suffice it to say that it is at this stage that the imaginative chronotopos introduced itself as the chief conduit of historical modeling (cf. the flowering of the genre of the historical novel). One should add to this the fact that the nineteenth century witnessed the appropriation by historical modeling of the existential or metaphysical chronotopos. The picture of semiotic modeling which emerged was the merger of the problems with mysteries and opening up of the possibility of the change of man in history and by history. The riddles presented by the imaginative narrative became one with problems-mysteries whose solution was promised by history. One can see the dangers in this hypertrophy of historical modeling, the dangers of bringing together the different time-space models of the historical, the imaginative and the existential, the dangers of introducing the programmatic dimension of semiotic modeling into history as the preferred paradigm.

I think that the rejection of the all-pervasive historicity which occurred as the result of the intellectual effort of the twentieth century, the emergence of structuralism with its preference of the imaginative time-space, the introduction of spatial models into much of historical and imaginative writing, the experimentation with time-space models in literature and art, the emergence of really trans-cultural, pan-historical (or post-historical?) global communications networks - all these are welcome reactions to the abuses of historical modeling.

We have to distinguish between the different time-space models, for a failure to do so impoverishes our experience as men and makes us especially vulnerable to manipulation. It also gives us an extra bonus of being able to appreciate the joys of a pure historical inquiry, pure artistic imagination and the truth of one’s own mysterious life.


NOTES

V. Toporov, ‘Ot kosmologii k istorii’. Tezisy dokladov IV Letnej Skoly.. . . Tartu 1970,57-63. For a more expanded version see Semeiotike VI. Tartu 1973, 106-150. Virginia Hunter, Past and Present in Herodotus and Thucydides. Princeton 1982. Reviewed by Hunter R. Rawlings, History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1984, 257. Ibid., 259. See especially: Hayden White, ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’. History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1984, l-35. David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’. History and Theory, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1986, 117-131.

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Literature and History: Riddles in Space and Time