In the Indelible Footprints of Truth: Writing Narrative History, Finding Historical Narrative

• Main Author: Gregory Dekter
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hyperion University 2014-10-01
• Series: HyperCultura
• Subjects: postmemory; emplotment; memoir; narrative history; Second World War
• Online Access: http://litere.hyperion.ro/hypercultura/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Dekter-Gregory.pdf

Abstract: This paper analyzes varying methodological approaches to the transference of both testimony and artifact in constructing written history. It follows two contemporary texts, each of which attempts to accurately and sympathetically portray the lives of specific Jewish families in the periods prior to and during the Second World War. The fundamental question of the paper has to do with determining the degree to which an author/historian may emplot himself/herself or his/her subjective voice into an explication of historical events, while maintaining fidelity to those events. In Hayden White’s terms, this constitutes “the fiction of factual representation”, that is, “the extent to which the discourse of the historian and that of the imaginative writer overlap”. Only by contrasting texts that operate differently - a mostly traditional historical approach set against a modern narrative approach - can we develop a vocabulary for tracking memory and postmemory transference. This paper, configured as a comparative textual analysis, shows that a delicate balance between objective data and subjective insight is the only viable way to extract clarity from what we understand as collective memory.