David W. Price
History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the Past
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pp. 338. $49.95
Reviewed by Roger Seamon

The modest claim of History Made, History Imagined is that novels offer a "countermemory or counternarrative to the popular and uncritically accepted referent that we take to be the historical past" (3). Our society, like all others, creates stories that make us special. Some historical works and some novels oppose those myths, the former largely - but not only - by showing that the myths are just plain false, the latter by telling stories based on different values and assumptions. As Price puts it, "novelists of [what he calls] poietic history concern themselves with choosing the narrative elements that put into play an array of values that are then offered up for scrutiny" (5). So far so good, and the best parts of History Made, History Imagined make explicit the counter-values: "Saleem [the hero-narrator of Midnight's Children] sees at the originary moment of India the path that was not pursued, and he selects the vision of Mian Abdullah and Picture Singh as possibilities for India's future, a future that would reject religious fanaticism and dynastic rule and embrace a society that respects cultural difference and allows all points of view to be represented" (140).

But Price has much larger ambitions, and that is where the book goes wrong. First, History Made, History Imagined begins by making, again, the case for believing that "no determinate past exists: rather, narrative structures produce events" (46). That is silly and not subversive of anything but a commitment to plausibility. That is why he can oppose novels to "the abstract and rational descriptions of experience that characterize many forms of contemporary historiography" (11). The banal truth is that both historiography and fiction are valuable forms of discourse, but, while there is clearly some overlap, they tend to do different, usually very different, jobs. Moreover, having referred to the Nazi murder of millions, Price loses heart and says, sensibly enough, but undermining his whole effort to argue against the reality of a determinate past, "fictional discourse does not vitiate the veracity of the historical truth depicted" (29). Why then all the fuss?

Second, Price bases his analyses of the novels primarily on Vico's and Nietzshe's ideas about history. As Price says, this is not a matter of scholarship: "I am not suggesting that the novelists whose works I examine have studied Vico and Nietzshe" (11). Given that fact, he rightly recognizes that one might ask why Vico and Nietzshe? (12), but the real question is, why anyone? The answer is that it is an institutionally driven effort to inflate the value of the novels, and the commentary, by making it "theoretical." Moreover, the theory gets in the way of the novels, and one is wearied by reading for the seventh time that there are "affinities" between the theorists and a novel. How could there not be? You name the theorist and I will find the affinity. But, intellectually speaking, why bother? (Yes, there are a few illuminating moments, but they are not worth the entire effort.)

Finally, Price's claims for the revolutionary potential of the novels and his own effort are hard to credit and the proposals themselves quite daffy, as well as being, in the case of Mumbo Jumbo, based on misreading. Reed mocks uptight America's anxieties about an explosive mix of racial rebellion and sexual license by imagining jazz as a conspiracy against the American way. It is neither serious history nor a program for revolution, but Price misses the sometimes funny point and says threateningly, "It is precisely this type of aesthetic phenomenon that will overturn the value structure of the period" (186). He then seriously asks, "How is it that sustained bodily activity, a focus on one's corporeal being, and the cultivation of bodily logic would disrupt if not overturn modern society?" (186-87), and answers that "For this, one must look to Vico and explore how he sees the connection between the very activity of thinking and the body" (187). Really? Price repeatedly inveighs against Western abstraction, but his book is out of touch with both the aesthetic and real worlds at all the many moments when it is a prisoner to the theory. History Made, History Imagined is an example of both diligence and intelligence led astray by institutional imperatives, and it is guilty of that very abstraction and obsession with technology (theory in the academy) that it purports to oppose.