Truth

[Update: this is the first of two posts.  The next installment will be along in a couple of days.]

Ralph Weir notes, with dismay, that "[w]hen I probed whether writers or film makers have any responsibility to tell the truth, not a single student felt they did," to which Ophelia Benson adds, "[j]ust because everybody 'knows it's just a movie' doesn't mean everybody doesn't also ingest some (or all) of the falisfications and believe them ever after."  The Little Professor is Historical Fiction Central, so I'll point out that both Weir and Benson are walking through a classic debate on the historical novel's (and now, historical film's) ethics: are historical novelists obligated to tell "the truth" about an event? The problem, however, is that it's not immediately clear how they can, if by "telling the truth" we mean "telling the truth as a historian might." 

When we talk about how a novelist handles "the truth," are we referring to his use of

• Incontrovertible facts (e.g., so-and-so was born at such-and-such a place on such-and-such a date)?
• Chronology (Y happened after X but before Z)?
• Actors (X participated in the following battle)?
• Evidence (we know X because of Y)?
• Explanations of causality and motive (Y happened because of W and X)?
• Narrative (the story of X)?
• Some combination of the above?

I could go on (but will refrain).   One of the problems with throwing "truth" on the table, though, is that we may forget just how much time historians spend arriving at probabilities, not truths.  Take my current convenient example, Anne Boleyn.  However much Eric W. Ives and Retha Warnicke disagree, they come together on one indisputable fact--namely, that we know remarkably little about Anne Boleyn.  In fact, we probably know more about William Shakespeare than we do about Anne.  We don't know when she was born or where she fit in the family birth order; we don't know anything   about her religious sympathies; we don't know if she really had a mole on her neck or the beginnings of a sixth finger; we don't know when she began sleeping with Henry VIII, or much of anything else about their relationship; we don't know what role she actually played in Wolsey's fall, let alone the divorce itself; we don't know if she was ever in love with Thomas Wyatt; we don't know exactly when her relationship with Henry collapsed, or all the specifics of why; we don't know if she committed any of the adulteries of which she was accused; etc., etc., etc.  Anne Boleyn's biographers spend lots of time working through testimony from decades after the fact, hearsay, rumor, court gossip, and blatant fabrication, with reliable evidence occasionally putting in an appearance.  Not surprisingly, Ives and Warnicke both spend their respective biographies explaining why such-and-such a conclusion is the most probable one, given the often corrupted chains of evidence.  And, as anyone familiar with the biographies in question knows, Ives and Warnicke arrive at spectacularly different conclusions by using the same evidence (and, in Warnicke's case, considerable speculation to boot).  What's a historical novelist to do?

Historical novelists, especially those working in the realist mode, generally keep this deliberative process offstage.  Sometimes they discuss their historical practices in a preface or postscript; sometimes they provide bibliographies; sometimes they include footnotes. Certainly, historical novelists from Walter Scott onward have frequently incorporated metafictional reflections on evidence, witnessing, testimony, documentation, and so forth into the narrative proper; postmodern historical novels often take the problem of writing history itself as their subject.  But while these reflections may say a great deal in general about historical thinking, they frequently say very little in particular about the novel in question.  Scott's Kenilworth, for example, spends quite some time on how narratives can form or deform historical truth, on how emotional bias affects the interpretation of evidence, and the like.  None of this, however, tells us very much about Kenilworth's own historical contortions (which include, among other things, a remarkably telescoped version of Leicester's relationship with Amy Robsart). 

What historical novelists--including the most self-consciously "truthful" historical novelists--frequently do, then, is represent the historian's probabilities as though they were truths.  Thus, novelists choose one proposed birthdate or another for Anne, try to arrive at some rational compromise on her religious beliefs, feature or eliminate the physical deformities, and so on.   The problem, in other words, is not that the novelist is sidestepping "the facts," but that, given the absence of incontrovertible evidence and the presence of her own plot, she needs to make the indefinite definite.  And, insofar as each "fictional fact" will affect plotting, characterization, symbolism, and everything else that goes into a novel...then, yes, the novelist will usually arrive somewhere that looks oddly familiar, without being quite what the historian has in mind.  Indeed, the historian may well agree with the novelist's final product (say, her characterization of Anne Boleyn), without agreeing with any of her narrative strategies.  Moreover, all this is before taking into account literary tradition, genre constraints, aesthetics, and so forth; one thinks, for example, of the difficulties involved in writing about Richard III after Shakespeare so memorably did him in.  The realist historical novel is still, after all, a novel; in its representation of the past, it usually aspires to verisimilitude, plausibility, and probability.  (Postmodern historical novels usually have rather different goals in mind.)  But it's still going to be fiction, first and foremost. 

Comments

[Lisa]

Spielberg is taking some heat about this now with his movie Munich, on a related matter--that he is drawing on one series of events out of the rest of the historical conflict. As a result, the Isreali response is seen, according to detractors, out of the of an ongoing war. If you don't know what happened previously, the Isreali response looks like an over-reaction.

This interests me quite a bit because of the problem of the ever-receeding beginning for a story teller and the problem of history in ethical and moral dilemmas.

Interesting post!

[Andre Mayer]

In fiction, the issue is not verifiable fact versus probabilities or even possibilities -- it's facts and probabilities and possibilities versus untruths, improbabilities, and impossibilities.

Greenblatt's Will in the World may or may not be legitimate scholarship, but does anyone argue that its embrace of possibilities goes too far even for fiction?

It seems to me that there are (at least) two related but distinguishable moral issues, social and individual, both of which apply in some degree to scholarship as well as to literature. The social issue has to do with misrepresentation of historical events and process in a way that distorts readers'/viewers' understanding of the world they live in. The individual issue has to do with our human responsibility to our subjects: the dead have no right to privacy, and no recourse against libel, but they are owed respect.

[Ophelia Benson]

Interesting, indeed.

And of course I knew I was mincing around in a large field. But my main point was just to say that it's too simple merely to say 'it doesn't matter.' It does matter. That doesn't mean I know how to resolve the issues, to put it mildly; but I do argue that it matters.

Funny, I've just been reading Greenblatt's Will in the World - and don't think much of it, I must say. At least not so far. The whole deeply conditional section on Campion and the Lancashire Catholic sojourn - I don't believe a word of it, and I don't find it interesting. And it all seems so stale - the 'he might have' stuff is so familiar from myriad other Shakespeare biographies; it seems silly to bother with yet another walk around that particular park.

But maybe it improves.

[Miriam]

I'm going to work my way back to the ethical issues in the second post, because I'm far from denying that they exist (it's something that comes up regularly in reference to my Victorian historical novels, which are making very specific claims about moral values and historical narrative). But where do "truths" and "untruths" reside in a historical novel--in individual details, the narrative's overarching "argument," or somewhere else?