Notes on Historical Fiction

In the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, E.L. Doctorow (of Ragtime fame) has an article – if you can call it that – entitled “Notes on the History of Fiction.” I say “if you can call it that” because he’s really tried to make the title fit. The article is seven quick sketches of different ways in which fiction treats history, using Richard III, War and Peace, and The Iliad (as well as Moby Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Three Musketeers) as examples. His basic point – if there is just one – seems to be that both the fiction-writer (he says “novelist,” but, well, Homer and Shakespeare) and the historian use similar techniques when they write, even though we think we’re reading them differently, expecting the historian to give us verifiable facts, but the novelist “to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage.” So Shakespeare’s So Shakespeare’s “Grand Guignol” (Doctorow's term, not mine) makes Richard III endure, even if the real Richard were probably a better man than one “determin’d to be a villain,” much the same way as the more outrageous stories we tell stick better than dry fact in history. Tolstoy’s selectivity in describing Napoleon in War and Peace slants the portrait toward a tiny megalomaniac, just the same as a partisan historian’s might. And we make a number of allowances for the way Homer tells his story, which we treat as fiction, as some of us do for the Bible, which a different some of us treat as revealed truth.

So, this blog thing, which I had let lie fallow for a while, may get a reboot out of this. I still want to treat it as a research dump (among my many others), but I think this is where I’ll think out loud about those techniques. I like reading history, I like reading fiction, and I get frustrated that they intersect so poorly so often.

But, I have to admit, I’ve never really looked very hard at exactly how they should intersect properly.

Which seems like as good a reason as any to fire this thing back up and see where it will go.