V History, Fiction, and Objectivity— Some Concluding Observations

Nor is it incongruous to include Vidal in such company. Not only does his vision of American history square with the vision sketched out in the works of Beard, Barnes, Martin, and Williams, but he is as much and as legitimately an historian as any of them. The majority of his historical works are novels, which is to say, works of fiction—yes. But as we have seen, there is much about conventional history that is fictional or quasi-fictional in character, since to tell stories about the past—to do, that is, what history does, first and foremost—is to falsify or fictionalize that past.

The fact is, too, that there are historical novels and historical novels. One sort of historical novel—the more common sort—is a tale of the invented events that make up the lives of invented characters set against an historical backdrop: the American Revolution in Kenneth Roberts's Rabble in Arms, the French Revolution in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, the U.S. Civil War in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, World War I in John Dos Passos's U.S.A., the Russian Revolution in Ayn Rand's We, the Living. The historical backdrop in such novels can be well or badly rendered, of course. It can be rendered accurately or inaccurately. It can be detailed and precise or general and vague. But a backdrop is a backdrop. The focus of such novels is less on history than on an invented story.

There is another sort of historical novel, however, a sort perhaps best typified in the present period by certain works of Gore Vidal and William Safire, in which there are few if any fictional characters and few if any fictional events. Virtually all the dialogue in novels like Vidal's Burr and Lincoln and Safire's Freedom is carefully drawn from the letters and journals of the historical figures who speak it (and from the reports of writers who knew them at first hand). In the "Afterword" to Lincoln, Vidal wrote that "[a]ll of the principal characters" in the novel "really existed, and they said and did pretty much what I have them saying and doing[...] I have reconstructed them from letters, journals, newspapers, diaries, etc."—which is, of course, precisely what an historian does.

In writing his American Chronicle novels, Vidal tells us in a 1988 essay, he attempted to "make the agreed-upon facts as accurate as possible. I always use the phrase 'agreed upon' because[...] the so-called facts are often contradicted by other facts. So one must select; and it is in selection that literature begins. After all, with whose facts do you agree?"⁴⁶³ And, as we have seen, this is a problem confronting the conventional historian as well. S/he too must select. S/he too must decide whose facts comport best with what we know about how things happen and about the way the world is.

Novels like Vidal's Burr and Lincoln and Safire's Freedom are exhaustively researched and painstakingly accurate depictions of actual events. Such books deserve to be regarded as works of history. Like Beard and Barnes and Martin and Williams, Vidal made choices, deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, choosing what he regarded as the important facts and passing over the less important or unimportant ones. Because he is a liberal, a man of the Left, a man who values individual liberty and free institutions, his choices are not unlike those that lie behind the works of Beard and Barnes and Martin and Williams— liberals and men of the Left, every one.

Conservatives have different values and choose different facts when they set about the task of writing history. But thanks to the true liberals of our past and present, a fairly vigorous marketplace of ideas exists in this country, and thanks to the decadence of our culture—which is to say, thanks to the steady decline of authority in our culture—since the late 1960s, that marketplace of ideas is now fairly roiling with dozens of competing American histories reflecting dozens of political views and senses of life. As readers, we get to pick and choose among them, and judge for ourselves.

This is the very best situation we could possibly expect, and we should be happy about it. Peter Novick was right: there is no objectivity in history—not if by "objectivity" we mean "neutrality," not if by "objective history" we mean a history untainted by "ideological assumptions and purposes" and the "distortions" such assumptions and purposes supposedly introduce into the historical record.⁴⁶⁴

If, on the other hand, we mean by "objectivity" something more like fairness or evenhandedness, then indeed it could be said that objectivity is possible in historical writing, however seldom it may in fact be achieved. Thomas L. Haskell, who teaches historical method and U.S. cultural and intellectual history at Rice University, considers it preposterous "to think of truth seeking as a matter of emptying oneself of passion and preconception, so as to become a perfectly passive and receptive mirror of external reality." In point of fact, no coherent history could be produced in any such way. As John Tosh notes, any attempt to simply read through the available primary sources without presuppositions or assumptions of any kind leads only to the production of "an incoherent jumble of data." Haskell invites us to contemplate an historian of a totally different kind.

Consider an extreme case: a person who, although capable of detachment, suspends his or her own perceptions of the world not in the expectation of gaining a broader perspective, but only in order to learn how opponents think so as to demolish their arguments more effec-tively—who is, in short, a polemicist, deeply and fixedly committed as a lifelong project to a particular political or cultural or moral program. Anyone choosing such a life obviously risks being thought boorish or provincial, but insofar as such a person successfully enters into the thinking of his or her rivals and produces arguments potentially compelling, not only to those who already share the same views, but to outsiders as well, I see no reason to withhold the laurel of objectivity. There is nothing objective about hurling imprecations at apostates or catechizing the faithful. But as long as the polemicist truly engages the thinking of the enemy, he or she is being as objective as anyone.

As Haskell sees it, "the most commonly observed fulfillment of the ideal of objectivity in the historical profession is simply the powerful argument—the text that reveals by its every twist and turn its respectful appreciation of the alternatives it rejects." The author of such a text, Haskell maintains, has "to suspend momentarily his or her own perceptions so as to anticipate and take account of objections and alternative constructions—not those of some straw man, but those that truly issue from the rival's position, understood as sensitively and stated as eloquently as the rival could desire."⁴⁶⁵

This is a tall order, of course, and one not frequently filled. But it is difficult indeed to imagine why a work of history that did achieve such fairness, such evenhandedness, should not be described as "objective." It is this standard, the one so clearly and persuasively delineated by Thomas Haskell, that should guide the efforts of historians to be "objective"— rather than the "essentially confused" ideal of "objectivity" that Peter Novick argued against two decades ago, the one he found to be based on "philosophical assumptions" that were (and are) "dubious," the one he judged to be "psychologically and sociologically naïve."⁴⁶⁶ Properly done, history is plenty difficult enough already. To saddle historians with a standard of objectivity that cannot be met—to make their work, not merely hard, but actually impossible—profits no one and, by turning historians into producers of incoherent jumbles of data, impoverishes us all.