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History, Sex, and Physics
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22823 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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1 / 2003 |
2,070 Words |
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Steve Dowden
Steve Dowden teaches European cultural studies and German at
Brandeis University.
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IN SEARCH OF KLINGSOR
Jorge Volpi, translated by Kristina Cordero
New York: Scribner, 2002
414 pp., $26.00
Historical novels sit uneasily on the fault line between poetry and history. Plato wanted to dispense with the services of poets altogether in the ideal state of The Republic. He regarded them as professional liars, purveyors of untruth and discontent. (That Plato, too, was a poet is a paradox of considerable interest.) The historian, by contrast, must set down the plain, unvarnished facts about the past.
Interestingly, Aristotle sets the poet above the historian. He dismisses historians as writers who merely record what has happened. They are stenographers in the court of human events. The poet's task--much weightier--is to imagine and disclose the possibilities of human experience, what might or, especially, what ought to happen.
"Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history," says Aristotle in The Poetics, "since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars." The imaginative has a more imposing dimension of moral responsibility than the merely factual.
Contemporary historians are not likely to be moved by such deliberations. They are inclined to view imaginative literature with Plato's hard and skeptical eye. Still, as writers charged with shaping fact into a literary form, the historians are part of Plato's paradox. An imaginative
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