ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the narrative concept of the figurative that enables the obvious turning of ‘the past’ into ‘a history’. Plainly, the deployment of the concept of the figurative is central to all forms of representation especially when engaging with history. Given the purposes of this book the concept of the figurative describes the author’s turning of ‘past reality’ into a ‘history’. They do this by deploying the so-called common sense concepts of ‘analogy’, ‘correspondence’, ‘resemblance’, and ‘likeness’. The past is inaccessible for obvious reasons. The past is the past but histories are invariably crude efforts at engaging that past or pasts that no longer exist apart from the historian’s metaphoric descriptions of the past.
