Introduction I. History and Fiction

Introduction I. History and Fiction Historical fiction is a form of fiction that is set in a particular historical period. An imaginary account of important historical events and figures of that period is presented in historical fiction. In the nineteenth century, this form was prominently developed by British and European novelists. Sir Walter Scott used historical novels to promote a sense of Scottish national and cultural identity. In the twentieth century, the World Wars and the fall of the British Empire made the function of historical fiction in British literature more complex. The novelists feh the need to use historical fiction to develop a common set of cultural images. These images were used to establish a national identity. The novelists revisited previous eras of uncontested British cultural and political supremacy. Their works also demonstrated a wish to understand the present condition. The novelists drew parallels between the tragic events of the past and the tragic events of the present and focused on the role of mankind. William Golding’s The Spire (1964) is set in fourteenth-century England. It narrates a story of the construction of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. The novel focuses on man’s destructive nature and the disregard for the cost of human lives who were involved in the construction of the spire. Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Red and the Green (1965), narrates the events of the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Both the novels revisit the well-known events in British history to ' illuminate the little-known aspects of these events. A lesser known perspective is adopted in their works. Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992) is set in the mid eighteenth century. It narrates the story of the slave trade form the point of view of a surgeon on board a slave ship (Rousselot 174). Since the advent of postmodernism in the 1960s, the distinction between historical fiction as an imaginary representation of the past and history as a true account of past events has been challenged (Rousselot 174). Hayden White “has emphasized the need for historians to recognize the literariness of their work, its dependence on the principles of narration and utterance, and therefore the ideological implications underpinning their representation of the past” (174). Commenting on the distinction between historical events and fictional events, Hayden White writes that historians focus on “events which can be assigned to specific time-space locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable, whereas imaginative writers—poets, novelists, playwrights—are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones” (White 121). The discourse of the historian resembles the discourse of the imaginative writer. The strategies that they use in the composition of their discourses are substantially similar. Many works of history can be read as novels, and many novels can be read as works of history. Histories and novels as verbal artifacts cannot be distinguished from each other. The distinction between the two cannot be made on formal grounds. The truths that these two discourses tell are different (121-22). White observes: But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of “reality.” The novelist may present his notion of this reality indirectly, that is to say, by figurative techniques, rather than directly, which is to say, by registering a series of propositions which are supposed to correspond point by point to some extra-textual domain of occurrence or happening, as the historian claims to do. But the image of reality which the novelist thus constructs is meant to correspond in its general outline to some domain of human experience which is no less “real’ than that referred to by the historian. (122) Prior to the French Revolution, there was no opposition between history and fiction. Historiography was considered a literary art. It was a branch of rhetoric, and the theorists recognized the imaginative nature of historiography. Although a distinction between fact and fancy was made by eighteenth century theorists, fancy played a role in the representation of facts. Theorists from Bayle to Voltaire and De Mably recognized that Active techniques were used in the representation of real events. In the eighteenth century, historical writing was judged on scientific as well as literary principles. It was recognized that fictional techniques of representation could be used to present different kinds of truths. These techniques included rhetorical devices, tropes, and figures. These techniques were similar to the techniques of poetry. Historians did not equate truth with fact. In order to represent the truth, historians used reason as well as imagination. They needed to know the techniques of fiction making. Historians began to equate truth with fact in the early nineteenth century. Fiction came to be regarded as the opposite of truth. Fiction which was a way of apprehending reality for the historians became a hindrance (White 123). Hayden White observes: History came to be set over against fiction, and especially the novel, as the representation of the “actual” to the representation of the “possible" or only “imaginable.” . Typically, the nineteenth-century historian’s aim was to expunge every hint of the Active, or merely imaginable, from his discourse, to eschew the techniques of the poet and orator, and to forego what were regarded as the intuitive procedures of the makers of fictions in his apprehension of reality. (123) Historiography was established as a distinct discipline in the West in the nineteenth century because the theorists began to oppose all forms of myth. Mythic thinking was blamed for the excesses and failures of the Revolution. Historians did not want party prejudices and utopian expectations to influence their interpretation. Historians wanted to find an “objective” way among the conflicting claims of the parties that took shape during and after the Revolution. Demythification of any domain of enquiry also meant the defictionalization of that domain. Thus, History, the realistic science, came to be considered the study of the real, and fiction came to be considered the study of the merely imaginable. It was the Romantic novel that Ranke castigated as mere fancy. Like his contemporaries, he also defined history as the study of the real and the novel as the study of the imaginary. Only a few theorists like J G Droysen recognized that history cannot be written without using the techniques of the orator and the poet. It was not recognized that there were different styles of historical representation as there were different literary styles in the nineteenth century. They were under the illusion that history could be written without using fictional techniques. Historians believed that ideological distortions or inadequate factual data produced different interpretations of the same sets of events (White 123-25). White states: Most nineteenth-century historians did not realize that, when it is a matter of trying to deal with past facts, the crucial consideration for him who would represent them faithfully are the notions he brings to his representation of the ways parts relate to the whole which they comprise. They did not realize that the facts do not speak for themselves, but that the historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is— in its /-^presentation—a purely discursive one. Novelists might be dealing only with imaginary events whereas historians are dealing with real ones, but the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of a representation is a poetic process. Here the historians must utilize the same tropological strategies, the same modalities of representing relationships in words, that the poet or novelist uses. In the unprocessed historical record and in the chronicle of events which the historian extracts from the record, the facts exist only as a congeries of continuously related fragments. These fragments have to be put together to make a whole of a particular, not a general, kind. And they are put together in the same ways that novelists use to put together figments of their imaginations to display an ordered world, a cosmos, where only disorder or chaos might appear. (125) The separation of the literary and the historical has been challenged in postmodern theory. The focus is more on what they share rather than on how they differ. Verisimilitude is seen to be common to both. Both are recognized as “ linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms, and not at all transparent either in terms of language and structure; and they appear to be equally intertextual, deploying the texts of the past within their own complex textuality” (Hutcheon 106). A number of issues regarding the relationship between historiography and fiction have been raised in postmodern novels: “issues surrounding the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference and representation; the intertextual nature of the past; and the ideological implications of writing about history” (117). Postmodern historical fiction no longer respects historical authenticity and does not abide by the known facts about important historical events and figures. It is more interested in probing the concept of historical truth and its techniques of representation. Linda Hutcheon has commented upon the impact of postmodernism on the writing of historical fiction in the 1970s and 1980s. Hutcheon coined the term “historiographic metafiction” to describe this particular type of postmodern historical novel (Rousselot 174). Linda Hutcheon, in her seminal work, A Poetics of Postmodernism, defines historiographic metafiction as “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon 5).

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