Narration, life and meaning in history and fiction

ABSTRACT

This article addresses two subjects relating to the topic of this issue of Scandinavian Journal of History from a ‘difference approach’ in narratology. This means that we assume that words like ‘narrative’ and ‘fiction’ are used to denote different things and that it is important to distinguish between these uses. We also assume that narrative texts that share similar surface structures can still ‘do’ different things and are approached differently by readers. The first issue we focus on concerns history writing and narrative. We are especially interested in the discussion about the distinction between narrative history writing and literary fiction. When discussing this issue, we distinguish between different uses of terms like ‘narrative’, ‘fictiveness’, and ‘fiction’. The second issue concerns the application of narratology as a method in the analysis of oral and written texts. We suggest that narratological concepts like narrator and perspective do not have the same denotation in the analysis of literary fiction as in the analysis of non-fictional narratives, and hence that narratology with its many concepts cannot be applied indiscriminately. In the discussion of these issues, we refer to factual and fictional written and oral texts concerned with migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative
• narratology
• fiction
• historical novels
• migration

1. Introduction

The subject of this issue of Scandinavian Journal of History, ‘Narrative and Experience: Interdisciplinary Methodologies between History and Literature in Nordic Contexts’, implies that there are such similarities between the two academic disciplines and their objects of study that scholars from these fields ought to be interested in similar methods. This is, when it comes to narratives, in line with the notion that narratology is a theory valid for all objects defined as narrative,¹ and hence that narratology, taken as a method, can be used in the study of all narratives.² This notion appears to be based on the presumption that narrative is a general category and that literary fiction, oral accounts, and history writing, for instance, are subspecies within this category. This presumption can, however, be put in question. It could, for example, be argued that words like ‘narrative’ are used to denote different things and that it is important to distinguish between these uses. According to this objection, texts, for example narrative history and literary fiction, can share similar surface structures and still ‘do’ different things and be approached differently by readers.

In this article we discuss two subjects we consider relevant in the discussion of the issue of sameness and difference in relation to the study of narratives in literature and history. Even though these subjects might appear familiar and well-known, they have often recurred in interdisciplinary discussions at Örebro University: Is history-writing narrative, and how can it in such case be distinguished from literary fiction? Can literary narratives and the narratives studied or produced by historians be analysed in the same way?

We will, when discussing these issues, refer mainly to narratives of migration. Migration is a relevant example, because fictional narratives that use this subject for their stories generally relate to historical events. This means, we hold, that such events have been transformed into functions of literary motifs and plots, instead of just facts from the past. Moreover, historians interested in migration are often concerned with individuals, their experiences and how they make sense of them, which means that they are interested in narratives, experientiality and sense-making. Accordingly, the question of difference and sameness between, and within, history writing and fiction, and the issue of interdisciplinary methodologies, are very relevant in relation to this theme.

Our examples from fiction are, firstly, Selma Lagerlöf’s novel Jerusalem, (2006, [1901, 1902]), which is built on the emigration of 37 farmers from a small village in a remote part of Sweden to Jerusalem in 1896. Our second example is Wilhelm Moberg’s novels The Emigrants (1983 [1949]), Unto a Good Land (1983 [1952]), The Settlers (1983 [1956]) and Last Letter Home (1983 [1959]). These novels narrate about a family that emigrates to North America in the 1850s. A third, more contemporary, example is Ola Larsmo’s Swede Hollow (2019 [2016]), which deals with Swedish emigrants to North America who became part of the urban ethnic working class that often lived under difficult circumstances.

Historians concerned with migration both analyse and produce narratives. We illuminate how migrants are studied from a biographical perspective, a method of investigation where researchers try to find examples of long-term experiences of migrated people. Such experiences are used as an important part of the researchers’ account.

Our examples from studies of migration are wide ranging and taken from such diverse fields as Swedish emigration to North America – in the form of a dissertation by Jimmy Engren ‘Railroading and Labor Migration’ – and from studies on migration and refugee-status in the postwar period. We also give examples from research based on oral narratives by historians Emma Strollo and Sanela Bajramovic Jusufbegovic and professor of Political Psychology Molly Andrews, that were presented at the research environment at Örebro University. Strollo focusses on narratives by German female labour migrants in Sweden after WWII, while Jusufbegovic’s study targets women activists in the organization ‘Kvinna till Kvinna’ (women to women) during the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Andrews has examined narratives related to political changes that occurred with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. We also refer to research on Chilean refugees and their processes of identity formation and meaning making. Our examples are thus meant to cover both traditional accounts of migration history as well as the orientation within the subject towards a focus on meaning making and informants’ narrative accounts of the past. This means that some of the work referred to is based on written accounts, i.e. traditional historical sources, mined with traditional historical methods, while most of the studies are based in oral history.

We will also refer to historians such as Peter Englund and writers like Per Olov Enquist, who have discussed the relationship between history writing and fictional writing and/or whose writings make up relevant examples for our purposes.

2. Two elusive concepts: narrative and fiction

The subjects of history and literature at Örebro University started the research environment Narration, Life, Meaning, in 2007. In seminars and workshops scholars from these and other academic disciplines have discussed methodological issues relating to the study of narratives and to narratology. After some time, the environment came to focus on biographies, fact and fiction, and narrative method. The environment and the focused topics imply a common interest in individuals, their experiences, and meaning making, but also a felt need to distinguish between fact and fiction. Even though the conversations have taken place in a generous atmosphere, it has been obvious not only that the disciplines have different traditions and aims but also that terms like ‘narrative’ and ‘fiction’ are often used in different ways.

2.1. Narrative

The concept narrative is currently very popular, not only in the subjects of literature and history but ‘everywhere’.³ However, it is not always obvious what it denotes. And it has proven hard to define.⁴ A common definitional approach is to refer to events. Edward M. Forster provides ‘[the] king died and then the queen died’ as a minimal ‘story’, and states that a ‘plot’ demands causality ‘[the] king died, and then the queen died of grief’.⁵ Gerald Prince endorses Forster’s description of a narrative as at least one event, a changed condition. He thus claims that ‘[the] king died’ is sufficient.⁶ Accordingly, a narrative can be described as ‘[the] representation of real or fictive events and situations in time sequence’.⁷ Others, for instance, Franz K. Stanzel, refer above all to the narrator.⁸ A narrative is then characterized by the mediating voice. Generally, these criteria are held together so that texts that recount events and are communicated by a narrator are regarded as narrative.⁹

Narrative could thus, according to common definitional approaches, be regarded as a text type and a recounting of at least one event. Given this view, narrative could be assumed to be an unproblematic and rather insignificant concept. The reason why some historians appear reluctant to talk about modern history writing in terms of narrative would thus not be that they shy away from this text type but rather that narrative is associated with old-fashioned, non-academic traditions, mostly presenting history writing void of theoretical perspectives and real analysis. There would thus be a dichotomy between ‘a narrated history of events’ of low academic status, and academic history writing based on discussions of theoretical perspectives and methodology, and historians would differentiate themselves from what could be called ‘pure narrative accounts’.

However, the notion that narrative is a text type, an account of events, can neither explain the current interest in narratives nor some recent discussions concerning history and narrative. Marie-Laure Ryan therefore, in an article about ‘Narrative’, examines how the concept is described, and not only how it is defined. Referring to theoreticians like David Herman, Paul Ricoeur, Jerome Bruner, Michel Foucault and others, she explains

narrative is a fundamental way of organising human experience and a tool for constructing models of reality […]; narrative allows human beings to come to terms with the temporality of their existence […]; narrative is a particular mode of thinking, the mode that relates to the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general […]; narrative creates and transmits cultural traditions, and builds the values and beliefs that define cultural identities; narrative is a vehicle of dominant ideologies and an instrument of power […]; narrative is an instrument of self-creation; narrative is a repository of practical knowledge[…]; narrative is a mold in which we shape and preserve memories; narrative, in its fictional form, widens our mental universe beyond the actual and the familiar and provides a playfield for thought experiments […]; narrative is an inexhaustible and varied source of education and entertainment; narrative is a mirror in which we discover what it means to be human.¹⁰

Summarizing these suggestions, we can note that narrative is comprehended as a form of knowledge and a fundamental structure of meaning making. It is this elaborated view of narratives that explains, we hold, why narrative has aroused such great interest.¹¹ Hence, when historian Jörn Rüsen says that the subject of history is, at heart, narrative in character, and that every claim about what has happened in the past is related through narratives, he is not only referring to a text type, an account of events, but to narrative in a more qualified sense. Rüsen talks about narrative as a ‘mental practice and form’ by which ‘time gains sense’. Narratives, he says, ‘transform the past into history; they combine experience and expectation–the two main time dimensions of human life’, and ‘create the field where history lives its cultural life in the minds of the people, telling them who they are and what the temporal change of themselves and their world is about’.¹² Even though Rüsen refers to narrative as a ‘linguistic form’, he also explains that ‘the operations by which the human mind realizes the historical synthesis of the dimensions of time simultaneous with those of value and experience lie in narration’. He describes ‘narrative competence’ as the ‘ability of human consciousness to carry out procedures which make sense of the past, effecting a temporal orientation in present practical life by means of the recollection of past actuality’.¹³ In short, thinking historically (a term commonly used in the field of teaching and learning in history) is, principally, narrative thinking. This, we hold, relates to the existential and cognitive aspects of narrative, aspects that explain why the word narrative was placed together with life and meaning in the research environment at Örebro University.

This use of the concept narrative relates to the growing interest among historians and literary scholars for narrative understanding, which in its turn closely relates to an increased focus on individuals, on human experience and meaning making.¹⁴ As a result, biography and oral history for example have, over the last decades, gone from being met with suspicion by historians to become the focus of both methodological and theoretical discussions.¹⁵ Even in the study of literature there is an increased interest not only in traditional narratological analyses of literary discourse but also in literature’s relation to human cognition and to narrative meaning making. Yet this understanding of narrative also relates to the fact that narrative history writing has been put in question.

2.2. Narrative history writing and literary fiction

The elaborated understanding of narrative implies, as we have noted, that narrative denotes a human ability to transform temporal events into meaningful configurations and to provide a particular knowledge. In the 1970s, historians like Hayden White pointed out what they thought could be regarded as similarities between historical studies and literary fiction when it comes to both form and content.¹⁶ This reasoning apparently assumes an understanding of narrative as denoting configurations with a plot (i.e. fundamental structures of meaning making), and White referred to simple accounts of events not as narratives but as annals and chronicles.

White proposed that historians tend to create meaningful narrative configurations, and that historical entities are hereby integrated in invented structures via ‘emplotment’.¹⁷ In this process, patterns are used that resemble genre patterns in literary fiction.¹⁸ This was taken to imply not only that this kind of history is narrative but also that it is fictive and hence difficult to distinguish from literary fiction.¹⁹ Even though such suggestions were seen as being rather indistinct and therefore very controversial in the 1970s, they still seem to be widely accepted.

White’s and others’ similar suggestions have been contested by historians and narratologists. However, when historians like Peter Englund and Christer Winberg insist that history differs from fiction they seem not,²⁰ like White, to use fiction to refer to the construction of meaningful narrative configurations, or to the use of patterns that resemble literature, but rather to refer to invention, i.e. that something is made up. The difference between history and fiction is thus that historians aspire to tell the truth or at least a truth, about events and people of the past. This is so even though the truth-seeking of the historian is about something that does not exist anymore and that does not readily have a reference in the present.²¹ Englund can therefore say that although he constructs a representation of a past reality from the sources, any fictional elements in a text will transform it to a text of fiction.²² ‘Fictional elements’ in this quote obviously refer to something invented and not to literary devices or the narrative form. This could be taken to mean that historians can narrate, even in the sense of using emplotment, and use literary forms but that they must give heed to certain restrictions. Consider for example historian Kim Salomon’s list of differences between the historian and the writer of fiction:

1. Historians do not construct events in a given order in the narrative. The order of events is given by the sources (be they oral or written).

2. Historians often use multiple arguments to show why one interpretation is better than another.

3. The historian aims for one interpretation whereas the fictional writer often opens for multiple interpretations and leaves part of the interpretive process to the imagination of the reader.

4. A historian cannot always present a coherent narrative (because, for example, sources are lacking or parts of a narrative are of no significance to the question asked).

5. Emotions have always been shunned by most historians (but have become a field of study during the past years).

6. While writers of fiction use historical people and events as ‘assets’ in their narrative and framing, the historian tries to distance themself from exactly the way writers use their characters, i.e. carriers of subjective emotional aspects.

7. Finally, the historian tries to find norms, guidelines, and methods to differentiate between what has happened and that which has not happened (our translation).²³

Salomon’s list presumes that writers of fiction are ‘freer’ in their relation to their subject (and hence to the past) than historians since the latter must fulfill certain obligations. Yet the suggested obligations do not appear to relate to the narrative form, as an interpretative and meaning-making structure. However, it would, we hold, be a mistake to assume that this means that historians use the narrative form indiscriminately. As we noted in an earlier section, historians commonly distinguish between ‘a narrated history of events’ of low academic status and academic history writing based on discussions of theoretical perspectives and methodology, and differentiate themselves from ‘pure narrative accounts’.

2.3. A common narratological reasoning about the distinction of fiction

Literary theorists like Ansgar Nünning accept that history writing can be narrative but contest that it is fictive and cannot be distinguished from fiction. Nünning holds that White’s reasoning is based on a narrowing down of the issue to the feature of narrative configuration, and that narrative configuration does not necessarily imply fictiveness and fiction. This reasoning entails that ‘fiction’ here denotes either invention or literature, like short stories and novels, and not a constructed configuration. History writing and literary fiction, the reasoning goes, have different relations to reality and different demands of veracity. A writer of fiction is therefore freer than a historian since the former does not need to be prepared to answer the ‘how do you know’ question.

Consequently, there are, besides contextual and paratextual signals, also elements in a text that signals whether it is a piece of history or for instance a historical novel. An important such fictional signpost is that authors of non-fiction cannot use an internal perspective. They are not allowed to know inner processes of other people and cannot depict other people’s feelings, thoughts, or motivations.²⁴ To Gérard Genette, it is precisely because characters in a novel are fictive that we can be informed about their inner lives.²⁵ But he admits that there is no consequent external perspective in non-fictional literature. It is instead characterized by informed guesses regarding psychological states, but these are always motivated. Moreover, a writer of fiction is also free to present long dialogues, recount what characters do when no one else is present, etcetera. The writer of historical fiction, Ola Larsmo, thus says that the writer of fiction is free to continue the story even when it is not supported by sources, whereas the academic historian must halt at that point.

According to this reasoning, both history writing and fiction can be narratives and organize their material to displays a genre, theme, or message. In both discourses a narrator recounts events retrospectively to a listener or reader. Yet writers of fiction and historians have different pretensions and observe different terms. This affects the discourse so that readers, based on textual signposts as well as paratextual and contextual signals, can distinguish between history writing and fiction and know whether or not a text should be read with the modifier ‘as if’. However, it is still a similar ‘game’ because readers imagine that a fictional narrative is told by a fictional figure telling a story that is true in the fictional world.

It has been objected that the suggested distinction between history and fiction is theoretical and normative, rather than empirical and descriptive, and that earlier history writing as well as some present writers do not always observe the suggested restrictions.²⁶ Moreover, writers of fiction are free to imitate factual genres and, for example, produce mockumentaries. And, as we have noted, the presented narratological reasoning presumes a different understanding of ‘fiction’ and ‘fictiveness’ than White’s, since White assumes, as we understand it, that the process of emplotment, not invention, makes narrative history fictive.

2.4. A difference approach in narratology

Genette’s suggestion that references to the inner lives of people are appreciated differently in factual narratives than in fiction, as well as the label mockumentary, imply that the distinction between fiction and history concerns the intent of a text, and the communicational agreement between a text and its readers. This is a basic tenet of a contextual and pragmatic approach to narratives since it assumes that texts that share similar surface structures can still pertain to different social activities or language games.²⁷ According to this approach, the term ‘fiction’ does not first and foremost refer to something made up, but to a specific ‘game’ or ‘discourse’, like short stories and novels. This game is not informative, in the sense that it consists of affirmed information communicated by a sender to a receiver, i.e. that someone tells about something that existed before the narration,²⁸ and it does not ‘establish a representational frame’.²⁹ This means, if we return to the quote from Genette, that there are no ‘references to the inner lives of people’; there are instead motifs where ‘character’ and ‘inner life’ is constructed by the artist, with the intent to give the appreciators their expected ‘aesthetic experience’.³⁰

Fiction, taken in this sense, displays actions and life as in a theatre, or a movie. Käte Hamburger describes this discourse, saying:

One may also say that the act of narration is a function, through which the narrated persons, things, events, etc. are created: the narrative function, which the narrative poet manipulates as, for example, the painter wields his colors and brushes.

Hence, the writer of fiction does not ‘narrate about persons and things, but rather he narrates these persons and things’.³¹ There is thus no need to assume a fictional narrator. And all fiction is unnatural if compared with so-called natural non-fictional narratives.³²

According to this reasoning, history writing establishes a representational frame and is characterized by ‘aboutness’. This means that even though history writing can use patterns that resemble those seen in literary fiction, and for example even hold sections referring to the inner lives of people, it does not produce the same function as such patterns.

2.5. History writing and literary forms

There is currently a marked interest among historians in literary forms and in cross-overs between history and literature.³³ Historian and member of the Swedish Academy, Englund, has, for example, suggested that historians should employ narrative forms – which we interpret as referring to plot and to literary forms and not to a simple recounting – in their work to draw larger audiences. Yet although Englund and other historians are interested in narrative and in literary devices, they are, as we have noted, keen to uphold the boundary between history and fiction.

But how do readers distinguish between history writing that is using literary forms and literary fiction, i.e. how do they, beside contextual and paratextual signals, determine which discourse (or ‘game’) a text belongs to? Consider the following introductions: two from novels, one from a dissertation in history, and another from a book by a Swedish historian. In which examples do the writers stick to what he or she can possibly know? And which examples appear to belong to a representative frame characterized by aboutness, or to a frame which narrates people or things?

‘Until his death in captivity, long after the tragedy had moved to its inexorable end, the Swedish general would still clearly recall the incident of the stoat. The third day was hot and heavy. It was the height of summer. Grey with fatigue and tormented by diarrhoea, he sought a place where he could sleep briefly in the shade.’³⁴

A young farmer was plowing his field one summer morning. The sun shone, the grass sparkled with dew, and the air was so light and bracing that no words can describe it. The horses were frisky from the morning air and pulled the plow along as if in play. They were going at a pace quite different from their usual gait; the man had fairly to run to keep up with them.³⁵

Mjödahult is one of Ljuder’s most ancient homesteads. Its name is mentioned in a court record two hundred years before the discovery of America. The Nilsa family had tilled and lived on this farm as far back in history as paper is preserved.³⁶

In the spring of 1910, 17-year-old Emil Andersson from Näs, a little village in Värmland, Sweden, chose to seek his fortune in the United States.¹ He was going to see his brother Johan, who had moved there a couple of years earlier.³⁷

In the first quote we are told what someone remembers. This could be regarded as a fictional signpost since we are not told how the writer can know these things. Moreover, it is not obvious if the part about the weather should be taken as a description by the author or as the perspective of the character. Assuming a difference perspective we could ask: in relation to what discourse and purpose is this beginning relevant and conclude that this could be the first lines of a novel. However, the quote is from Englund’s The Battle that Shook Europe, and readers will soon realize what kind of discourse they are taking part of, and, using a term from literary theorist Göran Rossholm, adjust their ‘stance’ to it.³⁸ According to Genette, this means that readers either will assume that Englund has access to sources in which a certain person relates that he remembered these things or that these are informed guesses by Englund. The fourth quote is from Jimmy Engren’s dissertation Railroading and Labour Migration. The contextual and paratextual signals (the quote has, for example, a footnote), are in this case stronger. And Engren finishes the story about Emil after a few pages and turns to a more traditional academic form. The second quote is from Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem and the third from Moberg’s The Emigrants. These narratives do not change form and readers will soon realize that this is fiction. However, the quote from Moberg has more of a sense of ‘aboutness’ than that of Lagerlöf, and it could have been the beginning of a non-fictional work. What we mean is that Moberg’s text has the guise of someone informing his audience about certain facts, while Lagerlöf, if we allude to Hamburger, more obviously does not ‘narrate about persons and things, but rather [s]he narrates these persons and things’.³⁹

Richard Walsh refers to relevance theory when discussing how readers determine if a text is fiction or not,⁴⁰ and Lars-Åke Skalin to congeniality, i.e. that readers assume that the content and form of a narrative is congenial with its purpose.⁴¹ Our examples above from four books support these suggestions but they also indicate that texts can hold sections that in themselves are difficult to classify as belonging to a certain discourse.

An important issue that this reasoning gives rise to is what risks a historian takes when using emplotment and literary devices. Advocates of new journalism use interior monologue, long dialogues, scenes, point of view, etcetera, and still argue that they are not writing fiction. However, it could be objected that this might lead to a loss of credibility. Another risk is that readers might change ‘stance’, and for example, if we allude to Genette, not appreciate statements of people’s inner lives as ‘informed guesses’ but as motifs that are building blocks in the plot or theme of a narrative. This relates closely to a third putative risk. Since a text which has emplotment so to speak determines its own values and meanings, readers cannot question these values and meanings unless they disembroil the structure of the text. Accordingly, readers might take part of such texts not as containing information of separate entities but as meaningful configurations in which the entities have already been given certain meanings and values.⁴²

3. Historical novels

Historical novels challenge the distinction between history and fiction since they, though the dominant discourse is fiction, also aspire to relate to a historical reality. Yet although writers like Lagerlöf, Moberg and Larsmo have done extensive research, they have, we hold, turned their material into fictional works about general subjects like break-ups, love, loyalty, etcetera.⁴³ They have also invented characters whose inner lives and experiences they display.

Moberg’s use of the historical context based in sources such as ‘America letters’ and other artefacts left by his relatives, delivers a backdrop for his epic on the migration to the United States. His purpose is obviously, in line with the reasoning of historians Richard Slotkin and Torbjörn Nilsson, to present a plausible (but not necessarily true) historical narrative.⁴⁴ Moberg’s characters are thus representing different aspects of the Swedish migration and can be said to be pieced together from Moberg’s own relatives and people that emigrated from the area where he grew up. Through Moberg´s characters, readers learn who typically emigrated and their reasons for emigration; however, all this is part of the backdrop that Moberg needs to construct a dramatic fictional narrative about a family. So, even though Moberg, in some sense, writes on the migration experiences of his relatives and people from his home parish, he does it as a novelist and not as a historian, as he, in line with Hamburger’s reasoning above, invents (writes) his fictional characters. He chooses the freedom offered the writer rather than the academic authority of the historian in this suite. As is well known, Moberg also at times chose the role of the historian and wrote extensive non-fictional accounts of Swedish history.

Lagerlöf started to work on Jerusalem when she heard about 37 farmers from a small village in Sweden who, for religious reasons, migrated to Jerusalem in 1896. Lagerlöf did research about the group both in Jerusalem and in the village of Nås. However, her ambition was to write a novel and not a documentary account of the emigration. She thus ‘fictionalized’ the material and was careful to signal how her work should be understood. According to common versions of narratology this was necessary since readers might otherwise miss the implicit denominator ‘as if’ and believe that Lagerlöf aspired to present a true version of the events. According to a ‘difference approach’, on the other hand, it was necessary to fictionalize the material in order that readers should realize what kind of discourse they were taking part of and attend to the novel with the right kind of attention. A prerequisite for such attention is that they bracket the historical issues, although the emigration and the depicted religious groups were controversial issues.

Ola Larsmo’s novel Swede Hollow is written in the same tradition as the novels presented above and is, like those, based on extensive research. The historical backdrop is an aspect of emigration to the United States that has had no prominent place in the general consciousness. It could even be argued that this is the main point of the novel even though Larsmo’s novel is a fiction about made-up individuals and families and their experiences. His aim seems to be to challenge Moberg’s image of emigration from Sweden as an entirely rural process, but he chooses to do this as a writer. In the afterword, he says that there is a knowledge gap here for historians to fill out, but that the sources are not particularly rich on the marginalized group of immigrants to which the main characters in the novel belong. Even though we hold that the dominating discourse in all three works is fiction, we would suggest that at least Moberg and Larsmo also intend to provide historical information. However, the writers of these works do not interpret historical events, at least not in the sense Salomon uses the concept. Consequently, adaptions of the novels like Bille August’s film Jerusalem, and Jan Troell’s film Utvandrarna [The Emigrants], as well as plays and musicals like Kristina från Duvemåla [Kristina from Duvemåla] are not apprehended as competing versions about certain historical events (such as can be claimed by non-fictional texts) but as aesthetic variations on the same material.⁴⁵

Some historians, like Torbjörn Nilsson, emphasize historical fiction’s ability to give readers/viewers a sense, and a better understanding, of the past, an understanding that cannot readily be conveyed in academic articles and dissertations. Nilsson also suggests that historical fiction can offer a possibility to reflect on the relationship between the past and the present, referring to novels like The Visit of the Royal Physician by P-O Enquist.⁴⁶ By dealing with questions related to the historical context, even though part of the narrative is fictive and not based on historical sources, Nilsson claims that there is something in the questions asked that relates not only to the historical context but to a more general understanding of society.⁴⁷ This could in a sense be said to also be valid for novels like Lagerlöf’s and Moberg’s since they distribute values and meanings in relation to events with a historical back-drop such as emigration, religion and politics. But one could also ponder whether Enquist’s novel is an interpretation of historical events in the sense that Salomon assumes. This novel could then perhaps be considered as an example of what Leif Sondergaard has called a semi-factual/semi-fictional discourse.⁴⁸

4. Narratology as a method: narrator and perspective

In the first part of this article, we have discussed the distinction between different narrative texts. In this section we turn to the application of central narratological concepts like ‘the narrator’ and ‘perspective’ to mainly compare the analysis of oral narratives with that of literary texts.⁴⁹ The focus on oral narratives relates to the elaborated understanding of narratives, presented above. Narrative is, in this context, a means by which people interpret their experiences and form their expectations. This process is so natural that people rarely reflect on it. Hence, scholars interested in narrative understanding often focus on unexpected events or crises that compel people to reconsider their expectations and their understanding of themselves and their lives. An important issue, that we will not be able to discuss here, is how this meaning making relates to the meaning making that occurs and is often thematized in literary fiction.

According to the difference approach, historical themes used in literature on the one hand, and biographic accounts and life course studies, whether in history writings or in oral presentations, on the other, will necessarily give different meaning to terms like ‘story’, ‘narrator’, ‘characters’, ‘perspective’, etcetera. For example, in the discussion of literary fiction ‘unreliability’ denotes that an author has used the device of an unreliable narrator to achieve, for example, ironic effects. In another context, say an interview, it denotes that the informant cannot be completely trusted, because he may be mistaken about something. It is of course not controversial to suggest that terms can be borrowed from one domain and applied in another. Instead, the important point here is that fiction and non-fiction are different domains and that terms like ‘narrator’, ‘perspective’ or ‘character’ cannot be applied indifferently.

4.1. Oral narratives

Oral history is a common method (and perspective) among historians for studying the modern and the contemporary. It has, for example, been applied extensively in migration studies, when scholars have examined people’s experiences and their interpretation of historical events.⁵⁰ Even though the interviews in such research can have different purposes, oral historians are often interested in meaning making and in how people construct narratives and make sense of their experiences. Oral history has often coincided with the study of memory – understood both as individual and collective processes – in the search for answers to questions not addressed in other historical sources. For example, research on the Chilean experience of life in exile during the period after the coup détat in Chile in 1973 has used oral history since at least the late 1980s. Related to this historical event and its aftermath, historians and informants have constructed narratives on refugee-status, questions on identity formation in exile, the life as a political refugee connected to different social and cultural contexts and of biographical accounts of life as an ‘exiliado’ from a life course perspective. The understanding of processes of identity formation, refugee status etc. has been informed by the interviews which are, as stated, historical narratives and interpretations in their own right.⁵¹

The narratives are often co-constructed in the interview situation and connected to specific purposes and questions. Izabela Dahl, Lars Hansson, Malin Thor Tureby, and other historians, thus regard this process of constructing an oral narrative as a joint venture between the interviewee and the historian, and it is theoretically understood as a cooperative process.⁵² Yet it could perhaps be said that the oral history material produced as a narrative by the two parties involved is later included in a narrative constructed mainly by the historian.

There is thus an interesting tension between the researcher’s interest in the informants’ meaning making, on the one hand, and the fact that the researcher often becomes a part in the construction of a narrative and hence the process of meaning making, on the other.

4.2. The narrator

The narrator is used in at least two ways in narratology.⁵³ Firstly, as we noted in an earlier section, the narrator is used in some theories to explain fiction. This explanation, which is presently highly contested, holds that every narrative is told by ‘an individual figure or agency […] backing the assertions contained in the narrative discourse or presenting the fictional world to us’. In fiction ‘[t]his individual figure or agency exists on a strictly fictional level, and is a distinct entity within the fictional universe projected by the text’.⁵⁴ In non-fictional texts the author is the narrator, while in fictional texts the author cannot be the narrator.

This theory of ‘an obligatory narrator’ holds a central position in the debate among narratologists concerning the distinction between narrative fiction and non-fiction, since it is said to: ‘establish a representational frame’.⁵⁵ Theoreticians who advocate the difference approach do not accept the obligatory narrator and propose instead that the narrator is optional, referring to character-narrators or to voice-effects, i.e. as literary devices that an author can choose to use.

We would suggest that large parts of Moberg’s and Lagerlöf’s novels do not use narrators in the sense of character-narrators. There are exceptions like the section in which Robert’s ear is narrating in Moberg, but this appears rather as a strange motivation to these parts of the story than as a real narrator figure. Englund’s and Engren’s beginnings (quoted above) could be apprehended as fiction without narrators. But if they are regarded as historical texts, it is Englund, the author, who affirms that ‛long after the tragedy had moved to its inexorable end, the Swedish general would still clearly recall the incident of the stoat’. And it is Engren who informs us that ‘17-year-old Emil Andersson from Näs […] chose to seek his fortune in the United States’.

4.3. Perspective, point of view

Terms like perspective, point of view, and focalization refer in everyday talk to the relationship between an observer and the object under observation, but in narratology are often used in an extended and abstract way.⁵⁶ These terms can thus denote for example a mode of narrating, the transmitter’s bias, and the presentation of worldviews or story worlds on the narrative micro-level.

Genette famously distinguished between the issues ‘who speaks’ and ‘who sees’ (not: ‘who writes’),⁵⁷ and talked about the latter in terms of ‘focalization’. His most important category is ‘internal focalization’, which denotes that an author presents a story, or a section of a story, from a restricted point of view. Another category that is relevant in relation to history writing is external focalization, which, somewhat surprisingly, denotes that the writer (or narrator) knows less than the characters, mainly because he has no access to their inner lives.

Even focalization can be analysed either as a literary device authors use to achieve aesthetic effects or as something obligatory in all narratives. For example, Mieke Bal holds that there cannot be any neutral or objective accounts, and that fictional narratives are accounts as much as non-fictional ones. Everything in a narrative is thus someone’s interpretation. Accordingly, she does not accept zero focalization or completeness of information and argues that this category should rather be described as ‘external focalization’, because ‘an anonymous agent, situated outside the fabula, is functioning as focalizer’.⁵⁸ This, we think, is based on a mistaken assumed ‘representational frame’ that is not valid for fiction. We would hence argue that there is no focalization in this quote, since there is no restriction of field:

A young farmer was plowing his field one summer morning. The sun shone, the grass sparkled with dew, and the air was so light and bracing that no words can describe it. The horses were frisky from the morning air, and pulled the plow along as if in play. They were going at a pace quite different from their usual gait; the man had fairly to run to keep up with them.⁵⁹

Scholars like Irene J. F. de Jong argue that texts often shift to internal perspective on the micro-level, even though they are not transmitted via internal focalization.⁶⁰ This focus on the micro-level is closely related to the cognitive turn in narratology, in which perspective takes on a different meaning. Ansgar Nünning suggests, for example, that perspective denotes the ‘semantic content of narratives’, which is ‘the world-models of the fictional individuals that populate the represented universe projected by narrative texts’.⁶¹

4.4. The application of the concepts of the narrator and perspective in fiction and non-fiction

When scholars outside the field of literary studies, for example in oral history, apply narratology as a method, they are often assuming ‘sameness’ in narratology.⁶² Yet it is obvious that the narratives they refer to are about prior, real events that are mediated by, for example, an informant.⁶³ The ‘narrator’ is hence not a fictional construct but the person being interviewed, who is interpreting events in his life. The narrator thus has a certain perspective, and his interpretation is never totally reliable.⁶⁴

Referring to some articles based on oral narratives in Berättande, Liv, Mening [Narration, Life, Meaning], we can note that Molly Andrews’ narrator, for example, a man from eastern Berlin, is trying to understand his reactions to the fall of the Berlin wall.⁶⁵ Sanela Bajramovic Jusufbegovic’s narrators give their versions of how the help from ‘woman to woman’ was organized in former Yugoslavia.⁶⁶ And the German women, interviewed by Emma Strollo, tend to marginalize the problematic fact that, after WWII, they had to work as domestics before they were allowed to apply for other jobs in Sweden.⁶⁷ All these narrators could be regarded as more or less unreliable since their stories are ‘selective and perspectival, reflecting the power of memory to remember, forget, neglect, and amplify moments in the stream of experience’.⁶⁸ Thus, concepts such as narrator and perspective in this context denote informants who narrate about and interpret their experiences and who always have a perspective on the things told of.

Neither Lagerlöf nor Moberg, nor their putative fictional narrators, are the same kind of narrators as those analysed by scholars using narrative methods in interviews or oral history. They are, as we have noted, not (at least not in the same way as historians) ‘interpreting’ prior events from a certain ‘perspective’, since, as Genette says, ‘the author has nothing to “know”, since he invents everything’.⁶⁹ And we would suggest that they are not unreliable because the writers are not, as far as we have noted, using this device. Moreover, Lagerlöf and Moberg are not restricted by an external perspective and can display the characters’ inner lives. They can also use an internal perspective (restriction of field) to achieve ironic effects, for example. The most salient form of perspective, however, is characters’ different comprehensions of primarily migration and religion; this, we would argue, is a dominant driving force in these novels. But this can also provoke readers, since the characters’ perspectives concern issues like the transformation of Swedish society, emigration, and religion and hence relate to the historic backdrop of the novels.

The Chilean informants are first and foremost representatives of history and historical processes; their memories of the past and their voices are part of a reconstruction of what ‘actually’ happened (or how they experienced what actually happened). For example, Moberg and Larsmo instead create characters from their own meticulous research. So, while the historian tries to reconstruct the past through oral sources and individual accounts, the author of fiction does the reverse. He deconstructs the historical process and from his findings and interpretation of the context, constructs characters. In short, the informants are representatives of history while the fictitious characters in the novels represent history.

5. Some concluding remarks

We started this article with the suggestion that the subject of this issue of Scandinavian Journal of History, ‘Narrative and Experience: Interdisciplinary Methodologies between History and Literature in Nordic Contexts’, implies that there are such similarities between the two academic disciplines, or their objects of study, that scholars from these fields ought to be interested in similar methods. However, referring to narratives about migration and to experiences from the network Narration, Life, Meaning, we have focused instead on potential differences between literature and history relating to narratives and narratology.

To begin with, we suggested a distinction between different uses of ‘narrative’: as a mere recounting of events; as a form of knowledge, cognition and human meaning making; and as the construction of coherent configurations through emplotment. We argue that it is ‘narrative’ in the latter senses that is focused in the ‘narrative turn’ and in the dialogue between the academic fields of history and literature.

We then turned to the suggestion that narrative fiction writing – narrative in the sense of emplotment – is fictive and cannot be distinguished from literary fiction, and suggested that those who object to this suggestion often assume that fictiveness does not refer to emplotment but to invention. Historians and writers of fiction thus have different relations to reality, and because of different epistemological constraints they set different boundaries for what they can write. According to this reasoning there are, besides contextual and paratextual signals, also fictional signposts in a text that signals whether it is fictional or not. This could be taken to support the notion that historians can use emplotment and literary devices. We then presented a pragmatic approach to narratives, which holds that narrative fiction and non-fiction are different games that ‘do’ different things. Accordingly, history writing can be narrative and cross the suggested boundaries as long as it, so to speak, does not change frame or genre, and readers will interpret the function and meaning of fictional forms in these texts based on their comprehension of the frame. It is, though, still important to discuss why historians cross the suggested borders and what they attempt to achieve by doing so. We imagine that the reason is not only to make a presentation more interesting but also an ambition to understand individuals and their experiences, perhaps also to understand historical events through the individual as a key whole or prism. We also discussed the risks with emplotment and literary devices in texts that aspire to be non-fictional.

Finally, we argued, assuming that history and fiction are distinct discourses, that narratological concepts, such as the narrator and perspective, take on different meanings in relation to the two discourses. This means, to our minds, that narratology and its many concepts cannot be applied indiscriminately in the analysis of either of these discourses.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Greger Andersson

Greger Andersson is Professor in Comparative Literature and leads the research environment Narration, Life, Meaning at Örebro University. Andersson has published several studies on narratology and the application of narratology as an analytical method.

Jimmy Engren

Jimmy Engren is Ph.D. of History at Örebro University and has specialized in migration and labor history in the 19th and 20th century. Engren has primarily published on Swedish migration to the United States and on post World War II migration to Sweden.

Notes

1. i. See Prince, Dictionary of Narratology, 66, Herman et al, Routledge Encyclopaedia, ix.

2. Cf. Bal, Narratology, Introduction, 1997, xv, and Herman, McHale and Phelan (eds.) Teaching Narrative, 2010, 7: ‘An additional responsibility is to show why the terms should be used – how they function as invaluable heuristic tools that can open up insights that would not otherwise be available’.

3. Prince, “Remarks on Narrativity,” 97.

4. To define ‘narrative’ has been important to narratology since its task has been described as to examine what ‘all and only narratives have in common’, (Prince, Dictionary of Narratology, 66).

5. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 60.

6. Prince, “Remarks on Narrativity,” 95.

7. Prince, Narratology, 1.

8.. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative.

9. There are some alternative definitions. Monica Fludernik, for example, takes her starting point not in ‘minimal narratives’, but in ‘natural narratives’, which she thinks reflect the origin and nucleus of all narratives. In her opinion, the basic characteristic of narrative is ‘experentiality’ (‘the quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience’), (Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 1996:12) and hence history-writing is not narrative. Fludernik has later softened her position (Fludernik ‛Experience, Experientiality, and Historical Narrative. A View from Narratology’, 2010, 40–72).

10. Ryan, “Narrative,” 205, 345.

11. Martin Kreiswirth thus suggests that the narrative turn not only refers to a focus on stories as stories within different disciplines but ‘storied forms of knowledge’. (Kreiswirthm, “Narrative Turn,” 380).

12. Rüsen, History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation, 2. See also Hyvärinen ‘Experiences and Expectations.’

13. Rüsen, History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation, 26.

14. Ibid.; Nilsson, “Så blir fiktionen”; Schaeffer, Fictional versus Factual Narration, cf. Thompson, The Voice of the Past, Thor and Hansson (eds.). Muntlig historia [Oral history], Åkerman et al Att skriva människan [Writing man], Östling and Rosengren (eds.) Med livet [With life]. Another field where interest in meaning making is evident is in the exploring of the uses of history and the ‘authentic paradigm’, see Gustafsson, Den förtrollade zonen [The enchanted zone], De Groot, Consuming History.

15. See Ambjörnsson (eds.), Att skriva människan [Writing man], Possing, “At fortælle om mænd og kvinder”; and Carlsson Wetterberg, “Biografin som medel”.

16. White, Metahistory, The Content, Slotkin, Fiction.

17. Books like Englund’s The Battle can hence be described as stories, in this case a tragedy, with a beginning, middle and an end.

18. White, Metahistory. cf Mink, “Narrative Form”; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative.

19. White’s conclusion in Tropics of Discourse is: ‘history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation’ (122), quoted from A. Nünning, “How to Distinguish,”’ 31. Yet, Nünning points out that White has modified his position in later publications (Nünning, 44).

20. Winberg, Varför skriver vi inte, [Why do we not write], 331.

21. See Evans, In Defence of History, chapter 3. For an overview of historical methodology and what these methods mean to our understanding of the past and its relationship to the construction of historical factual narratives see Gustavsson and Svanström (eds.) Metod. Guide för historiska studier. [Method. Guide for historical studies].

22. Englund, Peter. The Beauty and the Sorrow, (preface).

23. Salomon, “Fiktionens utmaningar”.

24. A. Nünning, “How to Distinguish,” 41–42. See also Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction and Genette, Fiction & Diction.

25. Gérard Genette, Fiction & Diction.

26. Nünning, “’Factual Fictions’”.

27. This reasoning comes close to a pragmatic approach to genres see Miller, “Genre as a Social,” Bakhtin, Speech Genres.

28. See Patron, “On the Epistemology,” 122.

29. Walsh, The Rhetoric, 69, cf. Skalin, ‘‟Telling a Story”’ and ‘How strange’.

30. Skalin, conversation.

31. Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 136.

32. Skalin, “How Strange”.

33. Söndergaard, “Narrativa strategier,” 189–204.

34. Englund, The Battle that Shook.

35. Lagerlöf, Jerusalem.

36. Moberg, The Emigrants.

37. Engren, Railroading and Labour Migration.

38. Rosshom, “Satisfiction – Economic Aspects” and To Be.

39. See note 31 above.

40. Walsh, The Rhetoric.

41. Skalin, “Fact and Fiction”.

42. There is an ongoing discussion about this issue, currently, for example, in relation to TV-series like The Crown.

43. Andersson, “Att göra konst”.

44. Slotkin, “Fiction for”.

45. Troell, Utvandrarna [The Emigrants]; Andersson and Ulvaeus. Kristina från Duvemåla [Kristina from Duvemåla]; August, Jerusalem.

46. Enquist, The Visit.

47. Nilsson, “Så blir fiktionen”.

48. Sondergaard, “Narrative strategier”.

49. Andersson, “Is There a Narrative Method”.

50. Thomson, “Moving Stories: Oral history”.

51. See e.g. Engren, Den unika individen; Hirsch, Chileans in Exile; Lindqvist, Drömmar och vardag i exil.

52. Dahl and Thor, Oral History, Constructions; Tureby and Hansson, Muntlig historia [Oral history].

53. The concept is also used to distinguish between the author and the author’s persona as it appears in a text.

54. Margolin, “Narrator”.

55. Walsh, The Rhetoric, 69.

56. Perspective, point of view and focalization are much discussed terms, see for example Surkamp, Perspective, 2005, 423–425, van Peer and Chatman (eds.), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective.

57. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 186.

58. Bal, Narratology, 148. Bal takes her starting point in the axiom: ‘whenever events are presented, they are always presented from within a certain “vision”. A point of view is chosen, a certain way of seeing things, a certain angle, whether “real” historical facts are concerned or fictitious events’ (Ibid., 142).

59. Lagerlöf, Jerusalem.

60. Jong, “The Origins”.

61. Nünning, “On the Perspective Structure,” 207.

62. Riessman, Narrative Methods.

63. Ibid., 22.

64. Hyvärinen, “Sameness, Difference,” 63–64.

65. Andrews, “’En sån grundläggande förvandling’”.

66. Jusufbegovic, ‘Muntliga berättelser’.

67. Strollo, “Drömmen om ett liv”.

68. Riessman, Narrative Methods, 29.

69. Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 74.