关键词: 多克特罗; 《大进军》; 摄影; 小说; 历史见证

Abstract: E.L. Doctorow’s The March highlights the ethical and epistemological significance of individual witness to historical understanding through its ironical foregrounding and forceful subversion of 19th century photography as a form of historical witness. This paper reveals the disadvantages and paradoxical ends of photographical witness by exposing how photography, under the sway of official discourse and personal motivation, distorts the historical truth of the Civil War and thereby manipulates history through its creation of a mythologized memory for posterity. On the contrary, The March accommodates a wide range of personalized accounts with its complex plot lines and multiple points of view, which manifest different aspects of the Civil War and present to the reader a realm of historical testimonies. In this way, historical truth of the Civil War resides in the multiplicity of individuals. This kind of historical understanding uncovers the human subject as the object of history, and history as a sector of intersubjectivity and a realm of testimonies. The March implies that history is history only to the extent that it has reached neither absolute explanation nor absolute singularity—to the extent that the meaning of it remains entangled in a realm of testimonies. In this respect, it becomes a more valid, more real and more truthful form of historical witness.

Keywords: E.L. Doctorow; The March; photography; fiction; historical witness