ABSTRACT

History is an authorial undertaking inasmuch as it is artificially ‘created’, ‘constituted’, or ‘developed’. The time before our perpetual present, then, is obviously not accessible apart from the histories we fashion for it. In practice, then, all histories are subject to the(ir) factitious expression of reality both past or present. Obviously, most people—and that includes historians—rarely invoke and/or deploy the concept even though it is indispensable to the development of turning ‘the past’ into ‘a history’, which, of course, is unnaturally and artificially created like every other authorial narrative whether it is thought to be ‘the genuineness’ and/or ‘the innovation’. What this means is that ‘the history’ does not exist in the past but only in the mind of the historian. However, historians strive to determine what is the most probable nature of the past but as authors they construe their chosen histories. The past then is hardly a discovery, however, its implication and explication is fixed only through the historian’s selected appealing rendezvous with the ‘one time happenings’ of the past. So, while historians may insist that they discover the history in the past, all histories are aesthetically ‘made’ by authorial art.