History Meets Fiction

Beverley C. Southgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781408220122
• eBook ISBN: 9781317862574
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Is history factual, or just another form of fiction?

Are there distinct boundaries between the two, or just extensive borderlands?

How do novelists represent historians and history?

The relationship between history and fiction has always been contentious and sometimes turbulent, not least because the two have traditionally been seen as mutually exclusive opposites.

However, new hybrid forms of writing – from historical fiction to docudramas to fictionalised biographies – have led to the blurring of boundaries, and given rise to the claim that history itself is just another form of fiction.

In his thought-provoking new book, Beverley Southgate untangles this knotty relationship, setting his discussion in a broad historical and philosophical context. Throughout, Southgate invokes a variety of writers to illuminate his arguments, from Dickens and Proust, through Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier, to such contemporary novelists as Tim O'Brien, Penelope Lively, and Graham Swift.

Anyone interested in the many meeting points between history and fiction will find this an engaging, accessible and stimulating read.

C h a p t e r 1

History and fiction

Before addressing specific issues of fiction and historical theory, two introductory chapters are concerned with a historical and philosophical examination of the relationship more generally between history and fiction. Topics in this first chapter include the original Aristotelian distinction between history and imaginative literature, with a sketch of its subsequent development; historians’ own use of fiction for evidence, and the use of the past in drama and historical fiction; and the construction, through narrative, of meaning in both history and fiction.

The relationship between history and fiction has always been close but problematic: as in any relationship, it has sometimes proved difficult to strike a mutually acceptable balance between interdependence and autonomy, and any equilibrium achieved has always proved temporary. In an ongoing attempt at stabilisation, a fence has long since been erected between the two, and has been claimed to mark one of the most fundamental of disciplinary boundaries – one that has, especially from the historical side, been most fiercely, passionately, and even desperately, defended.

For historians have long prided themselves on producing works that specifically contrast with fiction – that are ‘historical’ works precisely by virtue of not being fictional, that are verifiably ‘true’ in a way that fiction does not aspire to be. It may be the case that, as Carlyle claimed, ‘the Epic poems of old time [the historically orientated works of Homer, for example] … were Histories, and understood to be narratives of facts’.¹ But already by the time of classical antiquity a deliberate attempt was made to distinguish between those two genres.

So history, in Aristotle’s early formulation, described reality ‘as it was’ or as it had been, whereas poetry – which we can include here within the category of ‘fiction’ – could roam more imaginatively over what ‘might be’ or might have been. ‘The main object of … [history]’, as the Roman Cicero explained later, but within the same classical tradition, ‘is truth’, while that of poetry is ‘delight and pleasure’.² There might be some overlap and confusion between the two inasmuch as both are ultimately concerned with the recital and representation of ‘facts’ of one sort or another, and they may sometimes appear as complementary; as Voltaire puts it, ‘History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.’³ But the crucial point has generally been maintained that different knowledge claims are to be made about their respective representations – that, in contradistinction to ‘fiction’, history has to do with ‘fact’, with what is ‘true’; and ‘truth’ is the only appropriate goal for any historian. As the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote: ‘If the deeply sincere desire to find out how a certain thing “really happened” is lacking as such, he [the writer] is not pursuing history.’⁴

That most important distinction, which had been implied in Aristotle’s theoretical formulation, was early confirmed by the professed practice of his near contemporary Thucydides: with his pretensions to a ‘scientific’ treatment of the past, he took care to distance himself from more ‘romantic’ predecessors, who had (as he alleged) been less constrained by the evidential and procedural requirements of proper historians. But despite such self-affirming protestations, the distinction was never as clear as Thucydides claimed. Even his own resort to direct speech – where he puts words into the mouths of his characters that could at best represent what he thought they might have said – laid him open to the charge of embellishing his work in order to make it more attractive (something better left to those pleasure-giving poets). And such confusions, between supposedly ‘factual’ narrative and evidently ‘fictional’ intrusions, were, perhaps inevitably, perpetuated in the case of later writers who dealt with past people and events.

The fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, can be seen to mingle the two traditions in his Monk’s Tale, where he includes figures variously derived, not only from supposedly factual histories (Julius Caesar, Claudius, and Nero), but also from the Bible (Samson and Delilah) and even pagan mythology (Hercules and Anataeus)⁵ – with these all thrown haphazardly together in a way that foreshadows the more obviously contrived postmodern ‘metafiction’ of the twentieth century. More immediately, though, within the context of English poetry, the use of historical material is shown most obviously in the so-called ‘history plays’ of William Shakespeare. In these the dramatist uses mainly the second edition (1587) of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles – themselves a source of questionable reliability – as the basis for his own treatment of mediaeval power struggles, focusing on the Kings Henry IV, V, and VI, John, and Richard II and III. The genealogies presented by Shakespeare are generally accepted as reasonably accurate (or in line with the historical record), but he takes imaginative liberties in such matters as chronology, the ages of his characters, and the anachronistic presence of such items as clocks and games of billiards. Historically derived ‘fact’, then, is once again mixed in with poetic ‘fiction’, all in this case for dramatic (or, once again, pleasurable) effect.

For what Shakespeare does is (as we shall see below) akin to what Hayden White has more recently claimed of historians generally: that is, he contrives to impose an appropriate (in his case, theatrically appropriate) narrative on earlier chronicles. And as Thomas Heywood noted in the early seventeenth century, by doing that, and with the help of skilful actors, he succeeds in bringing the dead back to life – eroding the distinctions between past and present and providing instruction in such virtues as patriotism and obedience. So the audience at Shakespeare’s play entitled The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth (1612–13) is instructed by the Prologue to ‘think ye see/The very persons of our noble story/As they were living’. That is, the poetical drama is designed to bring history – the past – back to life, and so produce a kind of historical truth. And according to Heywood, that has sometimes, even in the distant past, been achieved to good effect: he describes how, as tutor to Alexander (later The Great), Aristotle arranged for a dramatic representation of an important historical event to be performed, in order to provide an example for him to emulate – to provide, as we might say, a ‘role model’ from the past. So he ‘caused the destruction of Troy to be acted before his pupil’; and Alexander was indeed so impressed by the portrayal of valour shown by Achilles that he modelled himself upon that character; and as Heywood concludes, ‘it may be imagined had Achilles never lived, Alexander had never conquered the whole world’.⁶ Such is the power of historically orientated drama.

If Shakespeare’s ‘History Plays’ mark a meeting and confluence of ‘history’ and ‘fiction’, with their deliberate use of the historical past for dramatic and poetic (as well as political and patriotic) purposes, historians of mediaeval historiography have noted, conversely, an early divergence between those two genres. For an interest in the individual lives of heroic figures, who were themselves perceived as liberated from any ‘historical’ constraints, developed into a type of imaginative romantic fiction that ran alongside the development of the severer discipline of history itself.⁷ And in the later theorising of such Renaissance writers as Sir Philip Sidney there are indications that historians specifically were expected to ascertain ‘the truth’, in order the more persuasively to present their examples for moral instruction. George Puttenham likewise distinguishes between, on the one hand, the poet who was free ‘to fashion [his material] at his pleasure’, and, on the other hand, historians (‘th’ other sort’), who ‘must go according to their veritie’ [truth], if they were to avoid incurring ‘great blame’.⁸

Even through the eighteenth century, though, and as late as the nineteenth, distinctions in practice between fact and fiction were sometimes far from clear or finally resolved. For, as Leo Braudy explains, ‘Both novelists and historians sought to form time, to discover its plot, and to give a compelling and convincing narrative shape to the fact of human life’;⁹ so that, for example, Daniel Defoe insisted that his novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) was not a ‘romance’ but ‘all historical and true in Fact’.¹⁰ Henry Fielding, similarly, as a novelist considered himself to be also an historian – a point revealed in some of his titles, such as The History of Pendennis (1845–50), and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), works in which Fielding believed that he was dealing with the sort of personal material that other historians should, but did not, include in their own studies; for he, no less than Hume and Gibbon, was interested in such central human concerns as character, chance, providence, and the meaning of the past.

With their reclaimed emphasis on science as an appropriate model, modern historians (as we shall see below) have often taken care to re-confirm the distinction of their craft from that of novelists, or writers of mere fiction. But it is a distinction that has sometimes (and of late with increasing insistence) been questioned from at least two directions. First, some writers of fiction have always chosen to base their work in ‘historical’ times and on ‘real’ historical events; and sometimes they have deliberately chosen to depict aspects of the past (or embellish them) in less than ‘scientific’, but rather more imaginative ways. That tendency culminates in full-blown ‘historical novels’, such as are exemplified by the enormously popular works of Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth century, and more recently by popular writers such as Rose Tremaine, Sebastian Faulkes, and Sarah Dunant.

Scott is particularly important here, and is becoming a subject of increasing interest to historical theorists. Claimed by Geörg Lukács (in 1937)¹¹ as the inventor of the historical novel, Scott in Waverley (1814), as David Harlan has recently described, ‘broke new ground’, by including ‘not only the determining conditions of a historical era but how those conditions shaped the mental and emotional lives of the people who lived through them’.¹² In works such as this, the attempts of characters to understand themselves include consideration of how they perceive themselves in time – understand themselves, that is, as historically situated. The author is concerned to retrieve and represent the ‘inner lives’ of such characters – their singular ‘voices’ (which are, again, partly a function of the time in which they lived); and that involves the inclusion of material that had often been previously neglected in conventional histories – the inclusion, as one contemporary reviewer put it, of ‘the blood and tears of thousands … [that had long been] passed over with a yawn’.¹³

It is, then, the ‘inner’ lives of people, in all their complexity, that writers such as Scott seek to represent, and it is the ‘human’ interest of historical fiction that still draws a popular response; for it can reveal alternative subjects and perspectives, and invite an enjoyable (as it seems) ‘empathy’ with people from the past. Herbert Butterfield is a comparatively rare example of a twentieth-century historian who appreciated what he called ‘the peculiar virtue of fiction as the gateway to the past’; for it is, he believed, in historical novels that ‘we find the sentiment of history, the feeling for the past’. So Scott in particular ‘does something for history that the historian by himself cannot do, or can seldom do; he recaptures the life of an age’ – that ‘atmosphere [which] eludes the analyst’. Professional historians may provide ‘a chart of the facts’ that governed people’s lives in the past, but such history ‘withholds the closest human things, the touches of direct exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Plates
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: History and fiction
• Chapter 2: History: fact or fiction?
• Chapter 3: Dryasdust and Co.: some fictional representations of historians
• Chapter 4: Fiction, history, and memory
• Chapter 5: Fiction, history, and ethics
• Chapter 6: Fiction, history, and identity
• Chapter 7: Fiction and the functions of history
• Chapter 8: Endings
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index