INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL RESEARCH

This paper, which is based on a lecture given at Moscow State University, aims to clarify the cognitive content of a literary text in its relation to the historical process. In more specific terms, it aims to compare the literary text — as a vehicle of extremely rich information about the ‘reality’ in a particular period and the processes of the cultural formation of the empirical subjects of history — with the traditional historical narrative, which is focused on the problem of historical events and structures of knowledge. On the basis of my works published in recent years — the book The Concepts Used to Analyze 'Culture', as well as a series of essays, which appeared in the journals Voprosy Literatury and the International Journal of Cultural Research — the paper analyzes the general configuration of cultural contents, which are retained by the literary text in its relation to the historical process, on the one hand, and familiar historical narratives and representations, on the other. After a general theoretical introduction, the paper proceeds to the discussion of traditional historical narratives, whose form and modality can be traced back to Greek historiography. It also briefly discusses some of the later types of historical narratives, like those focusing on the dynamics of historical ‘formations’ or technical developments. In all these types of historical research, a historical text can be little more than just one among many subsidiary assets. However, the paper contrasts these narratives with different types of twentieth century historical research, where literary texts suddenly emerge as a major focus of interest. These trends range from the French ‘Annales’ School’ in the first half of the twenties century to the American New-Historicism of the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, as the paper stresses, the theoretical reasons owing to which a literary text that describes imaginary worlds and persons may become a more important source of historical information than a document narrating ‘historical events’ have not yet been analyzed. This issue deserves an in-depth theoretical scrutiny of its own.

After a brief enumeration of the ‘traces’ of literary history as such, which — as is well known — are retained by literary texts, the paper draws the conclusion that the awareness of their existence contributes relatively little to the general understanding of the problem. In contrast, drawing upon my works mentioned above, the paper enumerates the broad range of diverse cultural processes and structures, which are retained by the literary text. These components, most of them crucial for the functioning of culture as a whole, range from the conceptual and epistemological fields, basic behavioral scripts and norms — through the processes of the archetypization of symbols and the metaphorical ‘mappings’ of cognitive fields — to the general interrelations of meaning and power, and, using Fredric Jameson’s felicitous term, ‘political unconscious.’ In the discussion to follow, two corollaries from this understanding are stressed. First, these are cultural processes and contents that form the very ‘reality’ where a particular ‘historical event’ takes place, as well as the empirical subjects of these events. Second, most of these cultural structures, processes and contents are situated below the threshold of the consciousness of the empirical subject. Correspondingly, in normal circumstances they do not become an object of reflection — not only in documents that are written by the participants and witnesses of the events, but also in much later historical works, as they are based on these documents. This, in turn, means that the literary text is far from being just an auxiliary carrier of historical memory, which is, however, capable of enlivening and beautifying the ‘dry language of historical fact,’ as historians used to say. It is rather the vehicle of a much more authentic and scientifically significant form of historical memory — not only in comparison to textbooks in history, but also to traditional historical research. Therefore, like the psychoanalyst, who seeks to transform the unconscious, confused or forgotten contents of the patient’s mind into clear and conscious understandings, so the cultural analyst must also strive to tranform the unconscious knowledge and vague memory of a literary text into the clear and conscious memory of cultural and historical analysis.