TOPIC: "More than a history, an historical novel humanises the characters . . . Humanising a character lets us see through their eyes, feel through their feelings and think their thoughts. Their understanding of a fictional world contributes greatly to our understanding of that period in history. Give me a novel any time."
How true did you find these statements after reading Cue for Treason?
Category History book Historical fiction Central focus peoples, nations, movements individuals perspective hindsight, longview contemporary, as it happens reader emotions supressed, unbiased,
scientific identify with character or narrator's
party purpose seeks patterns, causes entertainment, identifications historical data presented as maps, photos, text, tables integrated, holistic study of character only if necessary its central interest point of view of neutral 3rd person observer 1st person participant
© G. B. Smith 1999
1. Observations of historical events (detail, point of view, selections, limitations)
2. Feelings about historical events (emotional distance, instincts, regrets, fame)
3. Understanding of historical events (significance for nation, for self, personal dimension, eye-witness, etc.)
4. Novels sensitise, humanise, contextualise, dramatise, explore, realise
v Textbooks grandstand, relativise, philosophise, conclude.
At the outset, I must observe that these two different genres have different content, purposes, methods and results. This discussion will take up these differences. During this discussion, writers of history, travel, historical fiction and crime fiction will be compared.
1. Different Content and Purposes
History strives to integrate primary and secondary sources, strives to find causes in a global way. History strives to be scientific, that is, it strives to explain hypotheses through collection and analysis of data, assimilation of viewpoints and testing of explanations. History strives to be impersonal, or if it is not, it needs to declare its assumptions, frames of reference, and values and biases.
Historical fiction however has another purpose, to reconstruct past times in a holistic way using the features of the novel genre (plot, characterisation, setting, style and theme) to involve the reader in the experience of being present at historical events. If characters in a novel offer explanations for events, they will necessarily be limited to circumscribed points of view, limited by cultural assumptions, social attitudes, states of mind and the novelist's overriding purpose to create character. Primarily then a novel is a reconstruction of the past as art.
The novel necessarily involves the feelings in relationship with character, setting and plot. The novelist sets out to mould reactions, crafting our developing response in the world of the novel with all its richness, and yet within the necessary limitations of plot, theme and setting of that novel. Reading a novel is meant to be interesting, emotional, exhilarating and entertaining. Reading history may contain these elements but aims to be informative, reflective and in a critique mode.
2. Different methods
The historian like the historical novelist works with the facts but in a different way. History strives to integrate all facts to generate explanations. It searches to piece together all relevant material, recognising different approaches, biases and viewpoints and weighing up their relevant validities as explanations. The historian seeks control, "It is sometimes easier for the historian to picture the dead than to talk to the living" (Dening p. 10). He will seek explanations.
The historian must be more cautious and candid. Primarily, he must be fair, impartial and even-handed. He may range over the recent and far past to explain events, to seek explanations for customs, behaviours and social and political structures. Indeed, the historian has the duty to search exhaustively beyond his own experience. In doing so, he must be cautious and honest, beware of his own cultural mental framework, biases, and ways of seeing and evaluating that may conflict with what he sees and knows.
Nonetheless the historian is aware of his audience and these days even of his publisher's demands. Although his focus is not style, it will market his work. La Perouse was aware of this problem in his wonderfully self-conscious Preface: "I could have entrusted the writing of my journal to a man of letters. It would have been in a purer style and sprinkled with reflections which would never have occurred to me; but that would have meant presenting oneself behind a mask, and one's natural features, whatever they might be, seemed preferable." (Dening op cit. p. 45). Surely here is an historian intent on being himself, telling it "as it is" and distrustful of style.
The attempt to write history is necessarily ambitious. Trying to do it better, a new school of history-writing has arisen, called ethnography. "It is an attempt to return to the past the past's own present, a present with all the possibilities still in it, with the consequences of actions still unknown"(48). "The most successful ethnographers locate the author in the observational process"(51). Ethnographers strive to be doubly aware of "the facts", that different things are seen by different cultures. A paradigm example is the invasion of the Pacific by Europeans who brought a whole other world of science and culture when viewing Pacific island cultures. In this way of doing history, the facts are not taken for granted and interpretations are analysed. Hindsight is not the starting point. Ethnography is an honest attempt to defictionalise history by alerting the reader to inevitable ambiguities. Indeed, it is more scientific, for being more aware of the variables in its cultural transmission of 'facts'.
The writer of travel literature ("the armchair traveller") has another purpose however, somewhere between that of the historian and historical fiction writer. He (or she, to get rid of any sexism first and finally) also reconstructs his travels, but with a different reader in mind. Buyers of travel literature read for his preferences and observations which are expected to be based on evidence of course but are the stuff of the text. Agree or disagree with him we can, but again we are limited to his version of events. Travel literature is unashamedly a personal, firsthand reconstruction of events only in the writer's own experience, not in the distant but in the recent past. The fiction crime writer however constructs all his facts and is free to change them.
The historical novelist like Geoffrey Trease works within the facts but can fictionalise between them. He is not worried by the ambiguities of interpretations. The historical novelist contrives the illusion of freedom, where his characters speak and walk and act where they wilt, thinking and reacting as humans would, being as realistic as readers need them to be. He is a researcher too but only so that his fiction echoes the times, in the dialect, manners and attitudes of his characters. Like the playwright, the writer of historical fiction presents a theatre of history, not a microscope on events or a pastiche of disconnected impressions.
3. Different results
A successful historian will be judged on canons of fact, probability and correct hypothesising; the successful travel writer will be judged on prose style, honesty, and having a self awareness of his own tastes, interests and reactions; and the successful historical fiction writer will be judged on canons to do with the novel genre such as ability to create the illusion of a fiction, realism in character and setting, ability to create climax and resolution in plot, and sustaining interest in presentation of his theme. Because different genres have different results, their outcomes will necessarily be like chalk and cheese.
All three genres have their own proper content, purposes, methods and results. Whether we can successfully compare Cue for Treason with a text book on Elizabethan times at all is a moot point. For these contentious reasons then, I prefer to avoid the comparison altogether. # Author: G. Smith 13/2/1999.