HUNGARIAN STUDIES 15. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [2001]

Sándor Hites: Reluctant Supplements: Historical Novel, Historiography, and Historiographical Metafiction

HISTORICAL NOVEL sions of history, the interpretations of which they were keen to keep under their control. If one takes into consideration that the binary oppositions that have domi­nated the discourse of the historical novel, namely fictional/factual, representa­tional/figurative, beauty/truth etc., have always implied answers for the implicit question, "what is literature?" and "what is non-literature?", it can be understood that the genre always had to deal with issues concerning the changing boundaries of fictionality and factuality. When during the nineteenth century the notion of what counts as "actuality" altered, the canonical place of the genre weakened. One does not have to disagree with Hayden White's formalistic views, that fictional and historical narratives fundamentally share the same narratological and figurai devices, to recall Dominick LaCapra's probably more historical point of view. According to LaCapra, historians and novelists shared the ambitions to bring about experimental kind of literature until the professionalization of historiography towards the end of the nineteenth century (LaCapra 8). Thomas Carlyle's work, Sartor Resartus serves as a great example to support this view, though LaCapra adds, later historiography failed to catch up with the poetical changes of the novel, and the mutuality disappeared. And so did the rivalry? To put it another way, is LaCapra's argument totally applicable to East-Central European issues? To study the region might help to understand what we might call a peculiar competition of historical discourses. If one takes into consideration the ways in which two respectable scholars have recently dealt with the historicity of the relationship between literature and historiography, one might conclude that they end up schematizing this relation by reducing its temporal diversity into two unproblematic phases. Lionel Gossman argues that the relation of the two fields had been "unproblematic" before the nineteenth century, for history had been considered a branch of literature. Ann Rigney follows this line of argument, claiming that this relationship remained unproblematic, for during the nineteenth century history and literature became distinct disciplines. Gossman and Rigney appear to deal with a harmoniously struc­tured historical process, claiming that even though the stages contradict each other, they share upon the unproblematic nature of arrangement. It is quite surprising, one might add, that no particular attention is paid to the breakpoint of the story they develop. We shall precisely take into account the very moment, even if this moment lasted for some thirty years, when according to Gossman and Rigney, the unproblematic structure of the relation of the two discourses turns to an antago­nistic but equally harmoniously organized one. We shall claim for the existence of a rivalry, which is distinctive to the second half of the nineteenth century. If historiography proper and the historical novel are taken into consideration as competing discourses, then the breakpoint Gossman and Rigney have overlooked exposes a very significant moment in the story of this relation. We shall claim that

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