ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issue and Hayden White's rejection of the idea of the historian's discovery of the story. The fictional element emerges both when empiricists claim to be representing the story as it actually happened and when the deconstructionist choice of emplotment is taken to represent a story of pastness. One of the radical benefits of deconstructionist history is its breaking down of the barriers between its own form and the content of the past. The deconstructive historian's function remains that of interpretation, but an interpretation viewed as the translation or rendition of one text into a new narrative version which is another text of the historian's own invention. History thus conceived is more like a painting than a forensic reconstruction - an aesthetic appreciation of a past world rather than the recovery of its lost reality from the sources composed of individual statements about past reality.
