One of the central questions with
which any scholar or reader (or even any writer) of historical fiction has to
engage is what works in the genre hope to accomplish. There are lots of
potential answers to that question, but the fundamental divide is, it seems to
me, between accuracy or authenticity on the one hand and effectiveness or
readability on the other; between, that is, doing justice to the historical
details and periods and events on which a particular novel focuses and doing
right by the readers who have picked up said novel. Obviously the choice is not
an either/or, but I would argue that as a matter of emphasis and priority these
are two very different starting points; and I would go further and argue that
much of what we have called historical fiction over the years has chosen very
fully to focus on creating entertaining novels for which the history is a
backdrop, rather than on creating historical worlds for which the novel is a
foreground.
If that has been the emphasis
much of the time, it’s an entirely understandable one; readers who seek
historical accuracy can always turn to works of historical narrative and
scholarship, after all, and a historical novelist who does not connect to his
or her readers is likely to produce few sales and a short career. So long as
the historical focus is not being explicitly falsified or mythologized, as I have
elsewhere argued that the historical details surrounding Reconstruction
explicitly and destructively (to the book’s contemporary moment and for our
overarching national narratives) are in Margaret
Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936),
then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a historical novelist focusing
mostly on creating compelling characters and story rather than on exploring all
of the nuances of that historical world. But if and when a novelist makes that
choice, I think it would be very useful for us to have a separate generic
category in which we could place the resulting work: not historical fiction
but, perhaps, period fiction? If we were to employ that second category in that
way, it would allow the term “historical fiction” to be used solely for those
novels that do work to create historical worlds first and foremost—and would
hopefully likewise allow us to make clear that many such novels and novelists
have been able to do so without sacrificing any of their engaging and
entertaining qualities in the process.
At or near the top of that list,
for me, are the novels in Gore
Vidal’s American Chronicle, a series which Vidal has been writing since the
late 1960s and which now includes at least six novels (which I will list in
chronological rather than publication order; not included here is the recent The Golden Age [2000], only because I
haven’t read it and so don’t feel able to comment on whether it’s really part
of the series or not): Burr (1973); Lincoln (1984); 1876 (1976); Empire
(1987); Hollywood (1990); and Washington, DC (1967). The novels
certainly vary in quality, and the more recent novels in the series seem
somewhat more explicitly driven by Vidal’s own contemporary political agenda
and purposes (a charge that, from what I can tell, applies even more directly to Golden Age); it’s fair to say that a
decent percentage of even the kind of genuinely historical fiction about which
I’m writing here does feature such central political purposes, and while they
don’t necessarily diminish the texts’ success at creating historical worlds,
they do often provide the lenses through which we view those worlds. But the
earlier books in Vidal’s series, and most especially Burr, are among America’s most fully realized and successful
historical novels: both because of how richly they construct their historical
worlds (Burr imagines no fewer than
three such worlds: the Revolution, the turn of the 19th century, and
the 1830s); and because of how immensely readable and fun they are. To coin a
phrase, Burr made me laugh, made me
cry, and made me think long and hard about—and in fact even do further research
into—its historical and national subjects and stories, and that’s a pretty
successful historical novel if you ask me.
Next nominee tomorrow.
Ben
PS. Two more links:1) Empire, one of the few in the series that you can preview through Google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=RiYadJIIy80C&printsec=frontcover&dq=gore+vidal&hl=en&ei=cLOHTfG3CozUgQfsq5jVCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-preview-link&resnum=9&ved=0CFgQuwUwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false
2) One of the more interesting books on historical fiction, in which scholars write about historical novels and the novelists write back (two excerpts included through this site): http://books.simonandschuster.com/Novel-History/Mark-C-Carnes/9780684857664/excerpt_with_id/5185
PPS. Any historical novels or
novelists you’d recommend?
5/1 Memory
Day nominee: Joseph
Heller, who never equaled the scathing satire and bite
of his great Catch-22
(although few other American authors have equaled it either), but whose later
novels reflect an evolving
and complex satirical and humanistic
perspective for sure.
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