H2 Knowledge and Inquiry — History vs Literature (30/30)

1 Clear stand. 2 Ok. “The truth of how exactly World War Two ended should not be a matter of debate, since all historical accounts should be treated as literature.” Critically assess this view. [RI Y6 TP 2023] With the postmodern turn in the late 20th century, a growing number of historians began to forward the view that historical accounts are nothing more than literary artefacts, as divorced from historical reality as a fictional story. It is thus no wonder that some have argued that the exact nature of historical events—such as the end of WWII—should not be subject to debate, since all accounts of these events are invariably stories that cannot inform us of the reality of the past. While such a deconstructionist view is grounded in several problems of historical knowledge construction that introduce subjectivity into accounts, claiming that there is no difference between history and literature would be too extreme a position to take.1 Ultimately, the exact happenings of the past should be a matter of debate, because debate is precisely what differentiates history from literature by helping historical knowledge get closer to historical reality.2 The deconstructionist position that history is no different from literature does identify several pertinent sources of subjectivity in history that might superficially render it similar to fiction. First, the historian—much like the author of a novel—must often speculate as to what happened when sources are scarce, or subjectively pick and choose sources when they are abundant. Often, historical sources are scarce because many artefacts do not stand the test of time: erosion and geological forces have destroyed many would-be artefacts that could tell us about ancient civilisations, while oral traditions have often died out over the generations. Hence, when a historian is writing about such societies of the past, he must often exercise his imagination just like a novelist might, constructing possible explanations for the existence of Stonehenge or possible rituals that might have taken place in the Mayan civilisation. This introduces subjectivity into historical accounts, making them ostensibly literary in nature—shaped by the imagination of the author. Even when sources are abundant,

3 Very clear argument. the historian must select sources to form a cogent account of an event lest it become a meaningless compilation of facts. For instance, with tens of thousands of sources each with a slightly different explanation of how WWII ended, the historian needs to pick between them based on his subjective judgements. A Western historian might thus subconsciously choose Western accounts that attribute credit to the US’s atomic bombs rather than the impending Soviet invasion, since these sources cohere with the narrative of the war he was taught in school since young. As such, each historian is bound to write a slightly different ‘story’ of the end of the war, making history much like literature and any debate