Playing With History and Fiction

The interpretative imagination is ignored by the traditional historicists. The interpretative imagination cannot be free from the capacity to ‘construct’ or ‘make’ history. The literary text and the historical text are products of the interpretative imagination. Words are vested with meaning to decipher worlds. But meaning is arbitrary. In attempting to interpret the past, the historian lives within it (the past) and outside it. But in both positions, communication between the past and the historian remains mobilized. However, the coherence present in the historian’s discourse does not equal or reflect the coherence of the past. Language in the historian’s discourse ‘gives’ coherence to the past and in no way mirrors that coherence.But the arbitrary nature of language makes it difficult to mirror the past. It is through language that the imagination‘re’- constructs the past. The real of the past cannot be reduced to a single monolith. So historical writing does not or cannot refer to the actual reality of the past because history mediates through language. Language plays a major role in the articulation of social practices. Society is a product of ideology and situated in culture which is akin to the literary text in its endless play of signs and difference in meaning.

History is a linguistic construct couched and reconstructed within the socio-cultural codes. Similarly a literary text is a cultural and social product whose efforts to see the past are conditioned by linguistic limits. History in the postmodern world is problematized and its truth and objectivity are called into question. The arbitrary relationship between words and worlds and the inevitability of cultural relativism problematize the capacity of history to mirror reality. Further, history becomes mere distortion when it employs metaphors to describe events since metaphors describe the relative quality of an event.

Literature as a text is only one variant among other social practices involved in the production of meaning. The cultural nature of language makes it impossible for meaning to be contained within the structures of the text. Literature is an active agent in the construction of a culture’s reality as well as in the participation of its historical processes. Literature is in itself an ideological product of the culture and shaped by it. Literature constructs a culture’s reality by using a language that reflects the moral, political and social concerns of that culture. Meaning is conferred upon a historical ‘event’ by the linguistic energy enforced by the author. The possibility/availability of multiple interpretations to a single historical event attests to the arbitrary nature of language.
Metaphorical description of events in the literary text as in the history text is induced by personal prejudices as well as the socio-cultural and political ideology of the present. The “truth” of the past can be proved in history only by relying upon linguistic evidences of the present. Metaphorical descriptions allow the either/or premise upon which the history and the literary texts pursue the truth.

The language of the people of the partition sounds different in our context. We, at the present moment experience communal riots which are only a consequence of the partition. The partition of the past could be called the cause of a communal riot of the present but the reverse does not hold. A communal riot today can help illuminate the impact of the partition. Hence the partition cannot be lived; it can only be reconstructed through a vocabulary that exerts pressure on the interpretative imagination, a vocabulary that is alien to the present since the past is a foreign country and a country of the mind.