“Sull’utilità e il danno della storia” per la letteratura. "Arabia Felix" di Thorkild Hansen.

[Autom. eng. transl.] The "writing of history" by Thorkild Hansen in the breakup novel "Arabia Felix" (1962) would be based on the line that with Roland Barthes defines historical discourse as a real fiction: historical reality can never be described objectively, but it must necessarily be reconstructed through narrative schemes invented ad hoc to give it a meaning. History would thus be more like a novel than any scientific hypothesis: a reading of this, which will see its theoretical climax with Hayden White and its Metastoria of 1973: historical narratives are verbal constructions that as such show more similarities with literature rather than with science, and history is precisely such only within a narrative, since outside the narration the nude fact is mute and, beyond that, in the historical documentation there is no element that induces to construct its meaning in one direction rather than another. "The past is fiction of the present," wrote de Certeau, in the sense that the perspective through which we look at the past is provided by the present, and Hansen's writing fully demonstrates this. The narration of the first expedition with the goal of Arabia, as well as the first scientific expedition organized by the Kingdom of Denmark, does not have a mere objective interest in itself, that is, it has no "historical" interest in the most traditional sense of the term, but has for Hansen an interest and meaning for the present.