SOURCE: Chartier, Roger. Review of Fiction in the Archives, by Natalie Z. Davis. Journal of Modern History 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 381-84.

In the following review of Fiction in the Archives, Chartier contends that Davis's text blurs the boundaries between literature and history.

History is narration—whatever the history. Even in its forms that are most remote from the “revival of narrative” predicted recently, even in its disinterest in the event and in its most structural descriptions, the writing of history constructs its time schemes, defines the entities that are its objects, and embraces the relations that link them in the paradigm that commands all the strategies of “emplotment” and that thus governs fictional narrations as well. The difference between history and fable is not in the organizational principles of discourse, but in the relationship with a reality that has disappeared but that once was and that history claims to...