History and fiction

One of the themes that fascinates our group as we read Don Quixote is the relationship between story-telling and history. We have several layers of narration, as our narrator is drawing from a translation of the original "history" of Don Quixote. Within the plot, Don Quixote is convinced that chivalric novels are literally true, and as we move forward from the Cave of Montesinos, Don Quixote must convince Sancho that his mystical experience is true.

One of our group members brought to our attention the article "Just the Facts, Ma'am," published in the New Yorker in 2008. Jill Lepore, the author of the article (and award-winning author of other things), states that "historians and novelists are kin [. . .] but they're more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other's clothes." Lepore traces the development of the novel and history-as-an-empirical-enterprise in the eighteenth century. (I can hear my historian colleagues cringing. I am not suggesting that history is merely the uncovering of facts. Of course there's much interpretative work!)

This article provides an interesting read, especially in light of our conversations about Don Quixote--published in the seventeenth century before the developments Lepore details.