Reading historical fiction, by Gillian Polack

The interesting papers of colonial Australia have to wait a bit for my life is suddenly full of the relationship between fiction and history. I’m teaching it, in fact, and am embedded in reading things I already knew and rethinking them. That’s what I love about the history end. There is always rethinking. This is why it’s possible to read twenty different novels on the exact same subject and, if they’re all good novels with thought behind them, discover twenty ways of reading that part of the past.

For today, then, I thought I’d give you a list of five things (only five out of hundreds, so you can expand the list until you run out of thoughts) that help make the history in a particular novel thoughtful and unique. Another way of saying it is five reasons why many people enjoy the history in historical fiction.

1.        A good novel gives a voice to the past. That voice isn’t a still, small voice speaking to the soul, that voice is the novel itself. 

2.        A good novel can make us feel as if we’re walking down the street or eating a meal with the characters. Or even that we are one of the characters. That use of telling detail in an historical novel reminds us that we use five senses every day and that people in history, likewise, walked down streets and ate meals. It reminds us in a visceral way: we live in that moment at that moment in our reading.

3.        A good novel shows us what our current culture or what someone else’s culture thinks of a place and of a time and of people. I’ve just read a book that changes Judaism to make a Jewish character fit into the novel in a way that suits the writer: this is a reminder that the past may be immutable but the way we see it is ever-changing. The relationship between the fiction and the history is negotiated by the writer for us, for readers. That negotiation shows us a lot about the writer, but also about the culture the writer takes for granted. It’s a snapshot of two moments in time and is absolutely beautiful.

4.        A good novel also negotiates between scholarly history and the reader. Before the novel is written, while the novel is being written and often even while the novel is being edited, there is a conversation between the writer and between researchers. One of my favourite moments in this is when the writer asks a book about King John’s household what evidence there is for something they want to put in the book. “None” says the book. “Do I invent this,” the writer then has to ask, “Or do I find another way to tell this part of the story?”

5.        A good novel makes us forget all the negotiations and all the invention and the fact that it’s a one-off depiction of a place and time. It may drag us in or it may pull us in gently or it may lure us, but it gets us in and it says to us, “This is real.”

How Fictional is your History? by Catherine Hokin

We're having something of a surge in historical fiction films at the moment. You can lose yourself in the politics of medieval or Tudor Scotland with Outlaw King and Mary Queen of Scots, or the excesses of the eighteenth court with The Favourite. If the racial-tensions of 1960s America are more your thing, there's Green Book or you can loop back round to politics with Vice - which I'm including here as it covers Dick Cheney's early life and therefore slips in past the 30 year HNS rule for classifying a work as historical fiction. A little tenuous perhaps but that is rather my point...

 Robert the Bruce - Chris Pine would be preferable but
not Netflix's wrath

What the above films share is the accusation that they all play fast and loose with the facts, and are guilty of providing what Simon Jenkins in the Guardian called “fake instant history.” Screen outings that, in other words, become received wisdom - what I am re-christening Braveheart moments in honour of  the film dubbed the most historically inaccurate movie ever made. I'm not going to list all its errors here - there is a whole industry devoted to logging them - start with the small point that William Wallace was never called Braveheart (that was Bruce, and not in his lifetime) and the whole timeline is about 20 years out which really messes up a lot of marriages and deaths and you'll get the idea. Does it matter? Well yes - the last time I was at the Wallace memorial there was a full-size (thankfully cardboard) Mel Gibson waiting to greet the hoardes of visitors. To my mind this not only gives the film a legitimacy it doesn't deserve, it also necessitates a whole lot of de-bunking I'm not sure was widely available.

As I said in my review of Outlaw King (Historia Magazine, it's a bit ranty) I don’t mind a bit of cinematic embellishment if it enriches the story. Queen Anne didn't keep 17 bunnies in her bedroom to replace her lost children (rabbits being eaten not petted at the time) but that worked for me in The Favourite as a good visual shorthand for the depths of her loss. And no major historical events were harmed by their use. The Favourite does what many historical writers do - it found a story lurking round the facts (the competition between the two female favourites, the allegations around Anne of 'unnatural' preferences) and it wove something bigger. As Lucy Worsley said in the Guardian: "people at the time thought that Queen Anne and the Duchess of Marlborough were [lovers] and this was a line of attack that was used by their political enemies, so that’s one thing...Another thing is that people were very much sharing beds the whole time; that was a standard way of sleeping. So who knows when they were and when they weren’t having sex? It’s all very difficult to define, isn’t it?” So difficult to define but plausible, not jaw-dropping in the way of Outlaw King (read the review) and not down-right dishonest as in the case of Mary Queen of Scots. 

Personally I don't mind about the accents in this film or others set in periods where dialect and accent are hard to be purist about. Whether it was French or Scottish or some hybrid, we don't really know which one Mary had and we don't know what either of those accents actually sounded like at the time. But I'm with Simon Schama regarding the two women meeting - “the whole drama of Elizabeth and Mary lay in the fact they never did meet”. Like Outlaw King, one of the key words you hit when you google this film is true. It's not: the two women meeting is a major distortion I've already had to explain to more people than I wanted to (or who wanted to hear it). To coin an overused and too-needed phrase: it's fake news. 

The criticisms over the other films mentioned above are different - perhaps because those portrayed in them or their families are still alive. Green Book has been condemned by the family of African American pianist Donald Shirley for what they see as a completely false portrayal ("a symphony of lies") and for them not being consulted, precisely for that reason. Vice has been accused of being misleading, of fabricating events, of being shallow and being evasive with the truth over Cheney's portrayal - including by a large number of people with no reason to defend him at all.

 Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette

Things that were never historically done/said becoming not only popular belief but often the main thing we 'know' about a time/character is nothing new. The phrase let them eat cake was attached to a number of insensitive royals before it stuck to Marie-Antoinette and there's no contemporary account proving the accuracy/existence of Elizabeth I's famous Tilbury speech, although we're pretty sure Mary wasn't there. It is, however, a truism, if an annoying one that many people get their understanding of history from television and films, and likely also from novels. So where does a creative's responsibility lie?

Clearly no one wants to impose some kind of Stalinist censorship on film-makers or writers, who are also not exempt from these charges of being elastic with the truth. The recent condemnation of Heather Morris's best-seller The Tattooist of Auschwitz by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre as being a book which "contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts, as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements” has not made comfortable reading. Or stopped it getting a sequel. Film-makers insist they are not reporting history but a version of it. As writers we are all looking for the story in the gap, and we are also not historians: we are writing fiction. We do, however, live in a time when real and fake news seem to blend seamlessly together and there are concerns about the level of critical thinking many people are exposed to. What then, if any, is our responsibility when we take readers into the past? Is it to make it clear (through notes or end-pieces) how much of a novel has been invented as Kate Atkinson does in Transcription, commenting that she has made one thing up for everything true? She then does then go on to prove how rooted in fact all the made-up stuff is and how it never distorts the truth it's based in. Or perhaps it's Stephanie Merritt's (who writes as SJ Parris) advice that holds true: "if you are going to play fast and loose with historical fact for the sake of a good story, you'd better have done your research thoroughly if you want readers to take you seriously; only then will you have the authority to depart from those facts."

For me, I like things simple and to do as I would be done by. Let writers and film-makers turn Jane Austen into a zombie slayer if they want, as long as they call it fantasy. Let them bring bunnies or tigers or whatever they like into the nursery, as long as its clearly a metaphor. But please don't mess with timelines or bring in ridiculously anachronistic behaviour or change the nature of history. That's a different kind of fiction entirely.

Holes in History, by Gillian Polack

Most people in history are not well-documented. Some of the most interesting people to write fiction about are the people we can’t hear. A peasant from the twelfth century, the younger daughter of a noble who doesn’t believe women need to read and write, a Jew pretending not to be Jewish in order to save their own lives and keep their family lands in sixteenth century Spain, a child in fourth century Rome. I could give you pages and pages of examples.

The writer has a special task when we bring these people into a novel. These people are not in historical sources, or we look at the wrong historical sources to find them (traditional sources, perhaps, or modern analyses when they're still caged inside primary sources). When we write about them, we don’t have their voices. And yet we still want to hear them. 

We write what we can, drawing on what we know about people and creating a person of that type to fill that hole. This is one of the subjects I have been working on recently. My research goal is to understand what we draw on to fill those holes. When we break through the silence to give a young Jewish girl (pretending to be Catholic) in seventeenth century Latin America a voice through a novel, I like to know how we do it.

If this were an academic article, I’d analyse case studies of what writers do for at least eight thousand words. (I’m full of things I won’t do, today.) This piece is not an academic study. Also, I’m not where I need to be with my research yet, which means I can’t give you a simple case study to explain things This means I need to do something quite different to explain the holes and what we do with them.

Deep analysis and big studies can wait. We need to start talking now. The way we fill those holes shows why: the history we put into fiction is important. What we say about the past helps us live in the present. Right now, this is trickier than it’s been in years. This means that the history in our fiction is terribly, terribly important.

Why is this so critical to understand?

One of my ongoing concerns is how we carry biases with us. If we don’t know how we read novels, or a bit about the methods we use to encode culture within them, we end up in a place where, despite being wonderful human beings, we’re supporting bigotry and prejudice. Culturally, we’re doing this. Writers and readers are using stories that leave other people out in ways that can hurt them. And yet we’re not trying to hurt anyone.

I haven’t see analyses of the levels of racism and bigotry in the writing/reading community, but my experience of it is that we’re a set of communities that care about people. We're not writing our fiction in order to hurt anyone. Many of us are writing it as socially-aware people working towards a better world. What we’re doing is interpreting the past from certain directions and not realising the implications of this.

One of the easiest ways of seeing this in operation in a novel is to look for female characters. Count the number of female characters who have important parts in that novel.

Or count the number of characters of particular religious background . Judaism is the simplest to see in this instance: many writers don’t have Jewish characters in novels set in periods and places where there would be Jewish people. 

Thirteenth century Montpellier had Jews... and a mikvah.

Gender, religion, race – there are so many things one can check. There’s been an outcry on the web about the latter. So many people are pointing out that English history is not all white, for instance, and that Alexandre Dumas was a person of colour. Some of these issues are on the map, therefore, and we’re beginning to look at them.

I say ‘beginning’ because the moment we move into what we think of as pure history that describes a classic incident or Great People, we (writers) tend to fall out of this tree of self-realisation.

Good intent is not sufficient. My second most popular free article of all time is one I wrote about Neil Gaiman’s work. Gaiman, as a human being, is supportive of people from many backgrounds and cares about feminism. He unintentionally devised a universe of gods for American Gods that is problematic for women.

This and the awareness that many writers have of some of the issues also shows that we’re moving to a better vantage point to see what’s happening. We beginning to change the ground rules and allow more women in, more people of colour, more people of backgrounds who existed historically and who somehow miss being put in traditional fiction from a period. 

Only Christian males? This is the right place  to set a historical novel in. This region otherwise has women, Jews and much more.

But… You knew there was going to be a but, didn’t you?

We still have tools we use to write these new characters into novels. We will always have tools to write anything into novels. And we don’t yet know the effect of those tools.

I was alerted to this many, many years ago through the tools actors bring to their parts. I discovered in “Oliver!” almost all the interpretations of Fagin were of Jews with Eastern European accents. Fagin was based on Isaac ‘Ikey' Solomon, who would have had a London accent. If he had been born elsewhere, then his accent would have reflected that, certainly, but he wasn’t. He was born in London. Giving him an accent that couldn’t possibly be his own is part of the ‘othering’ of Jews, someone saying “He was different to other Londoners – let’s give him an accent to show this. What’s the accent that shows Jewish difference? Ah, I know.”

That particular tool used by some writers to bring history into their fiction is finding ‘common knowledge’ about a people or gender and applying it, whether or not it fits that particular  case. This common knowledge is partly stereotype, for that’s what we draw on when we haven’t focussed on a subject. Fagin’s accent. Making history male. Both of these are stereotyping.

Another thing we draw on when we haven’t focussed on a subject is the culture we live in. In a way, calling on stereotypes is just that, but it’s also possible to call on positive attributes and give them to a character. Turning female characters into American teenagers, for instance, or turning children into characters that reflect our own upbringing. When they’re quiet at table, what sorts of subjects they study and what methods they use to study. 

When I teach this, I explain that we’re missing a key element that some students used to gain basic literacy in Early Modern England. Some instructors served delicacies in letter form (some of the moulds survive) to young students. This fuelled a student’s approach to basic literacy and it also fuels the sentiment of those who aren’t taught. The servant boy watching at the door never gets to taste a thing, but carries all the food back and forwards. Will never get to taste a thing, for he’s among the unlearned classes. 

This different experience due to class might include eating different food at the dinner table on special occasions, and even having a different everyday dinner table eventually, but in the sixteenth century most English families treated their servants as extended family. They were often children in status and asked permission to do this or that, so not eating those letters is handy way of overcoming modern views of them and giving them more accurate lives.

This is what I’m working on now. Normally I wait until I’m much further in my research before discussing a subject. Writers have been asking me what they do in their work (the unintentional stereotyping and the drawing on their own culture to fill gaps) and I’ve been teaching it. This means it’s more than time I give you these examples. It’s only the beginning, but it’s an important subject to talk about.

If you want more of this and you live in England, you’re luckier than I am, for there’s a conference. It discusses a whole order of things related to history in fiction. It may or may not cover the work I’ve talked about here, but it will help writers see how other people see their work (which is a big part of writing better fiction) and it will help give contexts for both fiction and history. You can find more here. 

For the rest of us, there is this blog, and other online places. None of us have to work alone.

In Conversation with Alma Alexander, by Gillian Polack

Today I have a guest. Alma Alexander is a US fantasy writer. She has a deep and abiding love of history. I thought it might be interesting to have a conversation with her instead of the regular kind of post.

Alma Alexander, from her author page

Gillian: I've been working on how writers use history in their fiction recently. In your new novel, Empress, you use your historical knowledge in quite a particular way. Maybe we could start off our discussion with what you do and how you do it.

Alma: There is alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction. While the first two are obviously fantasy, you might argue that "straight" historical fiction, the kind that literally takes an event or an era that actually TRANSPIRED in our real-life timeline, is the "true" one out of that pack of otherwise gilded lies.

But is it?

Isn't history always told from the point of view of the victors, isn't it always remembered from what has been told, isn't there a dark and dusty back room where the untold stories go to molder into ashes in silence and solitude? And if you tell THOSE stories - even if you're telling an otherwise absolutely "straight" historical narrative...aren't you already wading into fantasy?

So let's split this into "living memory" and "ancient tales".

With things that might have happened in living memory, you're telling a story which will be remembered by people who were there. Or by their children to whom the stories were told. There are histories that people hide from outsiders simply because the pain is still – will ALWAYS be - too close, too real, too much to share. Should a story be banned, then?

What if it is too important to hide?

I hit a wall similar to this with Embers of Heaven, a novel that takes place some 400 years after its predecessor, Secrets of Jin-shei. That first book was based on an Imperial China, but Embers... took place during the equivalent what we knew as the Cultural Revolution. And one of the characters in my fantasy tale was at the heart of that 'real-world' revolution. I treated that book of living memory history gently. I took the characters whose story I was telling and I focused on them. Without coming out with things that rationalized or justified anything that was ever done by anyone during that time, I had to find a way to tell the story. Tell it straight. Find a way to simply be the messenger, and to let the recent history take care of itself.

And then there's a book like Empress, a story based on a glittering moment in the Byzantine Empire. There was a real love story to end all love stories out there - Emperor Justinian, and his love and soulmate, the Empress Theodora. I grew up with these stories, I cut my teeth on tales of Theodora.

But I didn't want the "historical" Theodora. I wanted the woman underneath the history. And I did not want to tell the straight "historical" story because Justinian was a bookish little clerk who wasn't romantic or manly, nothing like the emperor I called Maxentius. He was all mine. My creation. Someone I wrought so lovingly – flaws and all - that I fell a little in love with him myself. Heh.

My version of the Empress Callidora was likewise grown in the story oyster from the piece of grit that was the historical Theodora. Some of the things Theodora did my girl did too. Other things she did without much input by me. She always knew her own mind.

The world my Maxentius and my Callidora inhabit is NOT the historical Byzantium. It is a place called Visant, which shares some of the same historical touchstones. But my absolute joy in writing these fat historical fantasies is that I can take those touchstones and make them mean something else in my world. I can write the stories I want to write, even those dusty abandoned ones from the forgotten back rooms.

This is what historical fantasy does - it frees me to look at history from above, a high-flying goddess on golden wings, and create a world that is both utterly real and historically grounded, and something rich and strange that I alone had the weaving of.

Gillian: For me, as someone who looks into how writers use history, it seems that you're putting up three categories so that you can argue about inner truth. We can talk about the categories of alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction, however, they're not at the heart of what you're arguing. This is an excellent opening to the sort of fiction you write. Describing people in terms of their relationship to historical counterparts shows the depth of emotion you bring to your fiction and to the history behind it. For me, however, fiction can't actually show us the person behind the story. What it can do (brilliantly) is lead us into different stories from different approaches. It can expand our understanding about the world around us and give us more narratives about history. Most of the time, story is story, and the path you follow to create your characters was purely your path: history in fiction is always a construction by the writer, for the writer and the reader. It's always shaped by our narratives.

Stories are at the core of novels for me, not reality. However, I'm a historian (always and ever) and I always need a bridge from what I see and argue as a historian and the stories I tell as a fiction writer. This is why, in my fiction, I always have one character who sees the story. This is clearest in Langue[dot]doc 1305 and in Illuminations, where I have characters who argue the way historians argue. Artemisia and Rose are both concerned with what's happening in their lives (and, in Illuminations, in the manuscript Rose has found)  and their doubts mean that if there's a reader like me, who sees history as narratives we construct to understand our past and ourselves, that reader has something to hang onto. In my other novels, these characters are less obvious. I always give them a moment, however, and they look at what's happening and say "This can't be real" and often explain why. One of those moments for Ms Cellophane has been quoted by a few people: a character points out that they can't be in a horror novel, and gives reasons. Readers often ask me which character am I in my fiction. I'm none of them. That moment of clarity about narrative, however, that's me peeking in and saying "Boo!" to the reader.

Alma: I remember talking about the writing of battles with someone and what took shape is simply that you cannot WRITE A BATTLE if you've got a POV character in the middle of one. That's because the POV character in question is simply not in a position of knowing what the battle is doing. (S)he isn't IN the whole battle. The only concern of such a character is what is going on *right around them* in the heat of the moment. Their concern - their story - is their own survival. If a battle is won or lost - well, that is a larger question, and one that is decided cumulatively, and not by any single moment. But while a straightforward history might describe such a battle from the perspective of hindsight and of God, looking at it from a dizzy height and discerning tactics (if any) and the shape of the whole battle... if you're in the thick of it you don't see any of that. You're living the battle, not observing it. And it is so with a story, too.

A character can tell their own story - a story that might be nested inside a larger one, to be sure, as all personal stories in the end are because we all live in a shared larger world. But it is the individual story that we can see through the prism of any individual person's life, and it is through their eyes that the bigger story is seen, and shaped, and told.

I don't think enough is ever said about the very real fact that we are all, right now, LIVING IN HISTORY. It just hasn't become history yet, but with every passing moment it is closer to the past than it is to our present or to the future. Minute by minute our own stories drip off the ends of our lives and merge into that larger, shared, historical background that is the tapestry of human existence.

And writing a historical tale (they're all pretty much historical, except proudly futuristic science fiction) is essentially the distilled art of fiction. You're weaving a single golden thread in and out of a larger picture, and making that single thread meaningful within the context of a wider and more encompassing history...

Gillian: My inner historian argues that , using that approach, you can never write a battle. We see different things from the scrum to those we see from a nearby mountainside or from a chronicle written afterwards, but each of the things we see contains inherent bias. We bring ourselves to our writing and colour the scene with our thoughts. The difference between historical non-fiction and historical fiction include the boundaries (things like how far we may colour, what we may colour, which colours we have at our disposal) and whether or not the reader expects to be able to critically evaluate the text by retracing the research that went into it (scholarly apparatus).

As a reader, I expect to be drawn into the story if it's fiction and to be able to critically evaluate it if it's a historical study, but there is significant overlap and our humanity shows in every word we write.

Alma: You can write *A* battle, with any battle you choose to write. But could you write *THE* battle, something specific, something that pertains directly and in-tight-focus to a particular combatant within that battle? You correctly say that our humanity shows in every word we write - how could it be otherwise? We put so much of ourselves into everything we do, every story we tell, or at least we should, and it's the mark of the very best storytelling that the humanity of the writer has to shine through somehow (without being pedantic and preachy about anything, of course). And when fiction touches history it's so easy to slide into the accepted history pageant and forget (as always) the humanity of the under-history, the one never written, the one lived by the "losers" in any given conflict. And telling the untold story... isn't that what every writer dreams of doing...?

I try to do it, at least, with every tale that I tell. I like to think of fiction as a light, something that chases away the shadows from the dark places of the world, and I never forget the power and the privilege of being the hand that wields the torch...

Gillian: And on that note, I will leave Alma to her torch and me to my rather different light. I love it that there are so many choices for narratives and that we can all have valid views. It adds a richness to fiction, not knowing how far that we are going to agree or disagree as readers with the story that unrolls before us.