Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684857650 ISBN 13: 9780684857657

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Synopsis

Renowned historians tackle the subject of the historical novel in a collection of essays on the nature and accuracy of historical fiction, with responses from famous authors, including Don DeLillo, John Updike, Jane Smiley, and Gore Vidal. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark C. Carnes is a professor of History at Barnard College of Columbia University, editor of Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, and co-general editor of American National Biography. He lives in Newburgh, New York. Praise for Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

A few years ago I was reading a novel with my ten-year-old daughter, Stephanie. It was entitled My Name Is Not Angelica, by Scott O'Dell, about a slave rebellion in 1733 on the island of Saint John. In the final chapter the slaves are trapped by a French army. Rather than risk capture and a return to captivity, the slaves toss down their weapons and leap from a cliff to their death.

"Did that really happen?" Stephanie asked.

"I don't know," I replied. "But if it's a good story, does it have to be true?"

She didn't answer.

"I mean," I asked, "does it really matter to you whether the story was true?"

She remained silent for a time and then fixed me with a stare: "Dad, is this some sort of psychology question?"

Only a professor could ask a question of such ponderous silliness. Of course we want stories to be true. We want to identify with real heroes and heroines. Youngsters and perhaps the downtrodden of all ages may prefer fantasies of transcendent potency -- of Jack slaying the giant, of Superman bounding buildings, of child-wizards zapping evildoers -- but most of us want to learn from real people who have endured what we fear and done what we dream, whose experiences offer guidance as we seek to understand our place on the planet as it spins through the cosmos.

We like stories because they tell us about our world and enable us to learn from the experiences of others, an imaginative capacity that is one of the principal endowments of our species. The Iliad, the Bible, the Mahabharata, and countless stories about the past disseminate and explain the cultural traditions that shape our lives. Stories, too, counsel us on existential dilemmas of soul and psyche. In The Call of Stories, child psychiatrist Robert Coles notes that stories "not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisers -- offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we might make soundings." Stories attract us by resonating with our anxieties; they allay our anxieties by conveying information or conferring wisdom.

If we rely on stories to guide us through life, we want the guide to be reliable and truthful, and to tell it like it really is; however, we also want the guide to be artful and witty, and to lead us along paths with which we are familiar. The historical novel has emerged to satisfy these conflicting desires. It is inescapably a contradiction in terms: a nonfictional fiction; a factual fantasy; a truthful deception.

In the Poetics, Aristotle contrasted the constricted world of actual events -- history -- with the boundless imaginative realm of the storyteller's art. History was circumscribed and particularistic: "the thing that has been," poetry was unconstrained and universal: "a kind of thing that might be." An artful story was thus "a higher thing" than history. Herein rests the justification for poetic license. If the merit of a story is derived from the moral or poetic "truths" it teaches and the artistry with which it is told, why fuss over whether the story actually happened as set forth by the storyteller?

Whatever the morality of the matter, however, people have persisted in demanding that stories be "true." Diodorus, writing several centuries after Aristotle, was disturbed that so many listeners were put off by the classics. Too often, he wrote, the Greeks set up "an unfair standard" and required of the ancient myths "the same exactness as in the events of our own time." This, he said, was wrong. "A man should by no means scrutinize the truth with so sharp an eye." What he meant by "truth" here is unclear; presumably he defined the concept in aesthetic or psychological terms. This nebulous formulation, or one similar to it, has sustained storytellers for millennia.

The tension between good storytelling and "truthful" storytelling, between art and history, is similarly bound up with the evolution of the novel. Daniel Defoe, father of the English novel, steadfastly maintained that Robinson Crusoe (1719) was based on a real person. For the introduction to the sequel, Defoe even produced a "Crusoe" who obligingly insisted that the original tale was truthful and not a "romance." Defoe later chafed at the "envious and ill-disposed Part of the World" that challenged the book's authenticity: Robinson Crusoe, he insisted, was "all historical and true in Fact." Defoe's subsequent assertion that the novel was an allegorical representation of his own life did little to clarify what he meant by "historical," "truth," and "Fact."

Sir Walter Scott, generally identified as father of the historical novel, was more candid about the contradictory elements of the genre he did so much to advance. In the preface to Ivanhoe (1820), he explained that while a novel should be faithful to history, it must also "translate" the past into "the manners, as well as the language, of the age we live in." The past was distant and shrouded in impenetrable shadows, but somehow the artist would illumine its real features and make them recognizable to contemporary readers. How this was to be done, he did not say; and, in fact, his novels did not reconcile the opposing elements of the historical novel so much as make readers unmindful of them.

For the past two centuries, novelists and critics have wrestled with the problem, with literary fashion oscillating between "realism" and "romance," or some variant of these terms. But never before has the tension between "history" and "art" been more debated, or the boundary between fiction and nonfiction more porous. Television producers routinely enhance the news with reenactments and "docudramas" and they invent fantasy islands where accountants and hairdressers pretend to be survivors of shipwrecks. (Are these latter-day Crusoes more or less "real" than the original?) We discuss "virtual reality" in all seriousness and communicate with Internet "buddies" in on-line "chat rooms" with people whose identities are fictitious. We "reenact" Civil War battles that are "authentic" to the tiniest detail, save the bullets, while actual soldiers push buttons to fight simulated battles (and an occasional real one) in war rooms that resemble video arcades. Novelists write fictional accounts with accurate footnotes, while historians write biographies with fictional characters and imaginary footnotes.

And then there's Hollywood, whose watery notion of reality has seeped deep into the bedrock of American culture. Ever since D. W. Griffith blended history with racist romance in Birth of a Nation, the movie industry has pointed its cameras at sets resembling the past and steadfastly depicted the sensibilities of the present. Filmmakers now routinely blur fact and fiction, as when Oliver Stone slyly spliced documentary footage of the JFK assassination into his own grainy shots in JFK, or James Cameron showed fish gliding silently through the actual wreckage of the Titanic, or the directors of The Blair Witch Project nurtured rumors that their film had indeed been recovered from missing teens.

This subject was considered in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1995), a collection of essays I edited that bears some resemblance to the present volume. While working on that book, however, I was struck by an awkward asymmetry in the way historians and filmmakers went about their business: filmmakers worked with images and thought chiefly in visual terms; historians worked mostly with words -- historical documents and texts -- and relied on verbal expression. In a good film, the pictures replace words: a wordy movie script is almost by definition a poor one. But the historian's art is all about words. (Some in the profession judge a history book by the distance between its covers.) Filmmakers' emphasis on the appearance of films and historians' preoccupation with the scripts often resulted in a fundamental disjunction in purposes. I concluded that Past Imperfect had only begun to explore the tangled conceptual realm that lies somewhere between art and history and yet encompasses both.

*

This book was conceived as a more thoughtful expedition into this difficult terrain. The focus is on novels because many novelists have thought hard about the past and made it an object of concerted study, and novelists use words, and often use them better than anyone else. Here, there is no incompatibility of medium. Because there is no single "historical" or "novelistic" perspective, I recruited twenty important historians and nearly as many important novelists to give their views on the subject.

Each historian's essay on a novel is followed, wherever possible, by a response from the author of that novel. (An exception is Thomas Fleming, who here is allowed to display his professional schizophrenia as both historian and novelist.) I have grouped the essays into five topics: "biography," the West, slavery, religion and culture, and war.

This book is about the historical imagination; it does not pose as literary criticism. The novels included here were chosen, sometimes in consultation with the novelist, sometimes not, because they illustrated important issues related to the novelists' conception of the past. John Updike's Memories of the Ford Administration and William Kennedy's Quinn's Book may not be their most representative literary works, but these novels best convey their thoughts on history and fiction.

Some of the novels included here are fairly traditional in narrative structure: Gore Vidal's Burr, Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Tom Fleming's Time and Tide, and Annie Dillard's The Living. But because the volume seeks to examine the historical imagination rather than a literary genre, it includes experimental approaches to the past such as Wallace Stegner'...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0684857650
• ISBN 13: 9780684857657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Carnes Mark C.