Narrative L ife Span, in the Wake 12 happened.

To that end, he attends to the complex

textual operations involved in the historians construction of a real historical event and
in particular, to the irreducible groundedness of historical discourse in language.
If what is traditionally at issue for historiography is the epistemological status of real
events and their transmission in historical discourse, the task of contemporary
historiography is to develop criteria of truth that move beyond the nave understanding
that language is capable of representing a real past. As Le Goff asserts, It is vain to
believe in a past independent of the one constituted by the historian (HM 102). Drawing
out the implications of the contention that the historian does not have access to a real
event but rather draws on the textual and social traces of memory in order to construct
it, Le Goff cites with approval Barthess notion of a reality effect, that in objective
history, the real is never more than an unexpressed signified, sheltered behind the
apparent omnipotence of the referent. This situation defines what could be called the
reality effect. . . . [H]istorical discourse does not follow the real, it only signifies it,
ceaselessly repeating it happened, but that assertion can never be anything but the
signified obverse of any historical narrative.8
The contention that the real event is an effect of discourse has, of course, a myriad
of repercussions for the discipline of history, but one of them in particular has bearing on
the critiques of Arendt and Benjamin: The notion that the real is a discursive effect
allows Le Goff to bracket the claim of languages strict referentiality and to focus instead
on how historical narrativesand indeed, all narrativeshave internal structures and
logics, ones for which close analysis provides a means of understanding how the time of
historical narrative does not simply represent or mirror real time but is, in fact, a
product of the texts narrative structure. 9 As such, the call Le Goff makes for a precise
study of the temporal modalities operative both in the documents used by historians and
in historical narrative itself can be understood as a means both to counteract the sense
of an over-arching and endless temporal process and to open up the notion of historical
time to new understandings.10
In this regard, one cannot fail to mention Paul Ricoeur, who has also analyzed the temporal parameters of both
literary and historical narratives and has drawn important links between narrative and human finitude on the
basis of their shared temporality. In Time and Narrative, he writes that time becomes human time to the extent