#40 Sun (7/31/22) - [OW] On the literature of history

I awoke in a haze, a haze that would not be dispelled by sunlight, or coffee, or the heat of afternoon.  

I have a vague recollection of a dream in which I heard a voice, Borges'(?) saying that of the multitude of sins available to a man, the gravest of all was simply to not be happy.  

I awaken from one dream into another, which seems no more real to me.

For me, the things that happen now, in endless succession, (because everything that happens happens now) seem unreal. Because I cannot relive (or live) events and occurrences in memory, they only seem to become real to me when they are written down.  Consequently, things that are written down seem more real to me, in general.  And yet, I know that many, or even most, of the things written down are fabrications, intended not to be real. There is a blurring between fictions, meant to appeal either to the fantastic or the aesthetic, and facts, purporting to be a chronicle of events and things that happened. These also are a kind of fiction, a literature of history.

For some reason, I remain convinced, or perhaps persuaded, that written works intended to be historical, exceed mere fiction, because not only are they unreal, but they have the additional quality of being true by virtue of having actually happened.  It is just possible however, that there is some universe (or this one given long enough spans of time and space) in which everything has happened. Even the most fantastical stories may be recounting the true history of some other place or time.

If actual existence exceeds our ability to imagine, than there are true histories of some places that exceed our wildest imaginings. History ultimately tends toward the fantastical.

It may be that The Imaginary is an actual place, and has the same form of existence as The Real.  My never-ending desire is to encounter in all of the world's written histories, atlases and encyclopedias, all of the stories that populate fantastic literature. 

There is a strange inversion when one reads about the Viking conquest of northern England, for example, and detects the same undercurrents of dramatic fiction and then realizes that these stories have been dramatized and that history has inflected many fictional retellings, until the line between fiction and history is almost totally erased. Then one may come to realize that the line never existed in the first place. Was Troy history or was it myth?    

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From Jay Parini's Borges and Me:

“I mentioned that I had read classics at St. Andrews, and [Graves] wrote back to say he had just begun a translation of Suetonius for Penguin. Lives of the Twelve Caesars. One of the great works of fiction.”
“Isn’t it history?”
“History is a form of fiction—you must shape the facts, find an arrangement among them. Create a satisfying narrative.” (page 33).

(Alastair Reid, speaking with Parini)

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So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same. Let us greatly simplify, and imagine that a life consists of 13,000 facts. One of the hypothetical biographies would record the series 11, 22, 33 . . . ; another, the series 9, 13, 17, 21 . . . ; another, the series 3, 12, 21, 30, 39. . . . A history of a man's dreams is not inconceivable; another, of the organs of his body; another, of the mistakes he made; another, of all the moments when he thought about the Pyramids; another, of his dealings with the night and with the dawn. The above may seem merely fanciful, but unfortunately it is not. (On William Beckford's Vathek, by Jorge Luis Borges)