Fiction, History, and Myth: Notes Toward the Discrimination of Narrative Forms

An inquiry into narrative form prompted by the decline of modernism; Berthoff claims that narrative is a cognitive mode, and divides it into the three title categories. Fiction "tells us . . . how this or that species of experience may be absorbed into consciousness." History "is the story of happenings that are, or might be, otherwise knowable." But as the historian's relation to the events seems increasingly problematic, analysis of his narrative mode becomes more relevant. Myth is not about the appropriation of specific things, as is fiction, but a general outlook toward knowledge in general whose purpose is "to stabilize and extend classification itself." Berthoff's main concern is to recover myth, "the strongest cultural obstacle" to practical evils such as anti‑Semitism. (Derek Croxton)