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Quote for the day
From a Guardian piece about the perils of historical fiction and historical film:
The path a historical novelist has to tread is clearly beset by dangers. There is an inherent tension between trying to do something new and something old at the same time. One cannot have medieval characters using correct period language because no one would find the speech readable. Similarly, an accurate portrayal of a world in which most dutiful and conscientious fathers will regularly beat their sons is likely to alienate readers. If one was to write a novel about the real woman baptised in Dartmouth in 1737 as Constant Sex, it would have all sorts of double entendres and more basic entendres than she herself would have understood (the word “sex” having little or no connection with the sexual act in 1737). In describing the interactions of real individuals, one has to invent reactions or the character is just two-dimensional, and never develops. In creating good historical fiction, it is essential to tell lies.
Subtext: truth is stranger, and often better, than fiction, historical or not.
Author James Forrester goes on to stress that “telling lies” in historical fiction is not the same thing as “making mistakes.” He then enumerates some telling examples of both, from sources as diverse as Braveheart, Shogun, and Ken Follett’s fiction. If you are a stickler for historical detail, and if you are also passionate about historical fiction, and if you are aware of the impasse your stickling and your passions produces, this essay is fun times.
One approach to historical fiction involves the use of some sort of time displacement to put a modern-day person with modern-day sensibilities into a previous time period. For example, in Jane Yolen’s “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” a modern-day Jewish girl finds herself somehow transported into Poland, just before the beginning of the Holocaust. (The book was turned into an Emmy-award-winning screenplay by screenwriter/blogger Robert Avrech)
Connie Willis has done several novels and short stories using time displacement to explore history. In “The Doomsday Book,” a history student is sent back to the Middle Ages as part of her normal university studies..and finds herself erroneously in the middle of the Black Plague. In “Fire Watch,” historians visit Britain during the Blitz. A different approach to time displacement is used in “Lincoln’s Dreams,” in which a young woman having strange and disturbing dreams is left with no alternative but to realize that they are really the dreams of Robert E Lee.
From the introduction to Lincoln’s Dreams:
“In the first part of Lincoln’s Dreams, Jeff is offered a job researching the long-term effects of the Vietnam War. He turns it down. “I’m busy studying the long-term effects of the Civil War.” And I guess that’s what I was doing, too, writing this book.
Because the Civil War isn’t over. Its images, dreamlike, stay with us — young boys lying face-down in cornfields and orchards, and Robert E. Lee on Traveller. And Lincoln, dead in the White House, and the sound of crying.
The Civil War disturbs us, all these long years after, troubling our sleep. Like a cry for help, like a warning, like a dream. And we pore over it, trying to break the code, its meaning just out of reach.”