The Sample Convention, or, When Fictionalized Narratives Can Double as Historical Testimony

Abstract

The paper deals with the cases when fictionalized narratives can double as historical evidence to mass violence. These are the cases of narratives written by people who have experienced the atrocities and trials that they give account of but who represent the historical realities not in a directly factographic mode (that is, not as memoirs or autobiographies) but with the use of what Dorrit Cohn has termed “the signposts of fictionality.” The problem is particularly acute in the case of writers, such as the Gulag writer Varlam Shalamov, who deliberately blur the borderlines between their directly autobiographical (or rather memoiristic) stories and their fictionalized narratives. According to Wolfgang Iser’s The Fictive and the Imaginary, fiction is characterized by selection and recombination of material under the aegis of the “as if convention.” Yet selection and recombination occur also in narratives that obey what Philippe Lejeune calls “the autobiographical pact.” It is the “as if convention” which, when clearly operative, presents the narrative as fictional or at least fictionalized. However, in narratives of testimony this convention is often neutralized by what I call “the sample convention”: a mimetic staging of a pattern of events or relationships to show the mechanics of the ways in which unbelievable events could actually take place. The sample convention is used to demonstrate how things worked, not in one case, but in the experience of many people—with possible variations but with serially recurrent regularities. The paper discusses the narratological aspects of the sample convention, prominently including “serial iterativity,” with examples mainly from Gulag narratives. It then shows in what sense narratives of testimony, which are usually driven by specific ethical goals, can also function as arguments.