RESTORING CONTINUITY

NOTES ON HISTORY AND FICTION

JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ

History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023)

In 1935, as Europe witnessed the rise of fascism, Paul Valéry tried to identify the origins of the crisis in a lecture titled “Le bilan de l'intelligence.” Things were better, he claimed, when people were able to understand their present moment as the result of past events—that is, when “continuity reigned in the minds.” In this article, I discuss why that sense of continuity with the past is, in fact, indispensable for individuals and societies alike; using instances from great works of fiction, ranging from Don Quixote to the novels of Toni Morrison and Abdulrazak Gurnah, I suggest that fiction—the literary imagination of the historical past—might be uniquely adept at restoring continuity when it is broken.

Image by Adonyi Gábor.