Truth II

Let's begin with a hearsay anecdote.  Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt recently heard Lindsey Davis speak at the American Philological Association meeting in Montreal.  According to Dad, Davis' talk boiled down to something like this: "She did her research, and tried to get the facts right.  Still, sometimes you just have to make things up, and she certainly didn't think that people should be using her novels as textbooks.  And she also thought that historical novelists obsessed with getting everything 'right' were probably historical novelists you didn't want to read." Even at a remove, however, Davis' position dovetails with that of Charles Frazier, who dryly notes that "[n]ot long ago, I met a reader who told me her husband was convinced that at some point in Cold Mountain, I began making things up.  Her husband wondered when that was.  I said I knew exactly at what point I began making things up.  It was on page one" [1]. 

In one sense, all historical novels are "alternate histories": their narratives frequently offer up  fictional "evidence," motivations, and chains of cause and effect; imagined characters play important roles in key events; for the sake of clarity, both agents and actions have to be consolidated; chronology is telescoped or expanded; etc.  As Karen Hellekson points out, however, "[a]lternate histories revolve around the basic premise that some event in the past did not occur as we know it did, and thus the present has changed" [2]; realist historical fiction and film presume, as part of their standard operating procedure, that it's possible to alter how an event happened--sometimes drastically--without materially affecting the future.  Moreover, just as events from an author's life take on new meaning when incorporated into fictional narratives--and, therefore, in some sense cease to be "autobiographical"--so too do events from history.  Even historical characters frequently find themselves carrying significant symbolic burdens; they are not, in other words, always quite themselves.

I've been singling out the realist tradition in historical fiction and film because this tradition normally defines itself by its relationship to received facts, no matter how mediated or "problematized."  Historical fiction and film in this tradition frequently do make some claims for their truth-value or authenticity, even if those claims turn out to be hedged about by extremely thorny qualifiers.   Postmodern historical fiction, or what Linda Hutcheon terms "historiographic metafiction," tends to emphasize all the difficulties (aesthetic, ideological, textual, and so on) besetting such claims; to attack Alasdair Gray's Poor Things or Charles Johnson's Middle Passage for their anachronisms would be to rather spectacularly miss the point.  Certainly, we might quarrel with a postmodern historical novelist's understanding of how historical thinking works, but we wouldn't necessarily complain about the "accuracy" of a novel that made no claims to be accurate.  But then, we're right back to Davis' point about getting things "right": good history (especially of the antiquarian variety) can make for pretty dreadful art. 

That being said, people criticize realist historical fiction and film on a regular basis, especially when those works take on hot-button issues [3].  But when we complain that these works aren't "accurate" or "telling the truth," what do we mean--especially given that all historical fictions are falsified to a greater or lesser extent? Or, as Valerie Martin complains, "Why, I asked, did these readers, knowing the story they were about to read was a novel, feel betrayed to learn that it was not entirely factual? Why insist that they should be able to trust novelists, who are paid to traffic in lies?" [4] What sort of inaccuracy goes beyond the pale?

I'm a Victorianist, and so have been known to become somewhat grouchy when bad things happen to good Victorian people.  Let's take Mrs. Brown as a convenient example of a historical film (albeit a somewhat dull one, but certainly well-intentioned overall).   Strictly speaking, this film poses serious dangers to the mental health of any full-fledged Victorianist:

1. Disraeli is Prime Minister during the entire film, which presumably would have come as news to the Earl of Derby.
2. Disraeli apparently continues being Prime Minister after the film's climax in the late 1860s, which presumably would have come as news to Gladstone. 
3. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 never happens.
4. Disestablishment is on the table much earlier than in reality.
5. The Queen and the Prince of Wales attend the thanksgiving for his recovery in the wrong place.
6. Speaking of the Prince of Wales, his serious illness and eventual recovery took place in 1871-72, not in the late 1860s. 
7. John Brown is supposedly in disgrace after the queen emerges from her seclusion, which was not the case.
8. John Brown distrusts Disraeli--when, in fact, Disraeli was one of the few people he actually appears to have liked.
9. One of the maids refers to Tennyson as "Lord Tennyson," well before he received a peerage.

And so forth.  Now, given that so much is wrong here, what (if anything) can be said in the film's defense?

To begin with, let's sort things out.  The only thing here that's probably a mistake, as opposed to a deliberate change, is #9; #5 presumably means that the production team wasn't allowed to film at St. Paul's.  #1, while aggravating to historians, is necessary for dramatic reasons: introducing the relatively unfamiliar Salisbury and immediately jettisoning him would clutter the narrative to no real purpose, especially since the subplot understandably emphasizes a politician trying to stay in power instead of getting into power.  Hence #2, as (again, from a dramatic standpoint) it makes little sense for Disraeli to lose--especially given #3.  (There are other reasons for #1-#3, which I'll discuss in just a moment.)  #4 is at least still attributed to Gladstone, even if he's not sitting on the right side of the floor at the time.  #6 suggests that the production team was trying to heighten the action by compressing it, while also keeping Disraeli's first ministry as a chronological limit-point (presumably, having Dizzy be PM in 1872 would have stretched things a little too far).  But what about #7-8? Why can't John Brown be nice to Disraeli?

Traditionally, Disraeli's role in film & TV was as a "Mr. Smith"--the somehow authentic outsider who, once ensconced in government, models an ideal version of citizenship.   In Mrs. Brown, though, Disraeli is the consummate insider, and John Brown--although not an official power--becomes the new model of pure, disinterested (but loving) devotion.  While the Queen's private secretary mocks the idea that "Highlanders are good for the health," the film actually winds up endorsing this position: Highlanders are good for the national health.  Brown's willingness to destroy his standing with the Queen for the good of the country contrasts markedly with Disraeli's cynical royalist pose.  This cynical royalism derives, in turn, from Mrs. Brown's dependence on The Madness of King George (1994) for much of its plot outline: Disraeli's function in the plot bears a suspicious resemblance to that of the earlier film's Pitt the Younger.  In other words, Mrs. Brown is as much indebted to a traditional cinematic political narrative about "outsiders" (not to mention an earlier film) as it is to Victorian history.

My point, then, is that it's actually very difficult to talk about either "truth" or "untruth" here; we have a combination of factual inaccuracies (just about all of which are motivated by dramatic needs), a popular cinematic plotline used to organize events, a number of true events, plausible and sometimes implausible speculations, and a number of arguments (about virtue, citizenship, and national identity, among other things).  If we're going to talk about falsification or, as an earlier commenter suggested, "respect," it seems to me that the most profitable way of doing so would be to look at the film's implicit arguments, rather than any simple deviation from the facts per se.  Even then, though, it's still difficult to talk about "the truth" when what we're evaluating is more the complexity and quality of the work's engagement with the past. 

 

[1] Charles Frazier, "Some Remarks on History and Fiction," Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other), ed. Mark C. Carnes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 312. 
[2]  Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 2. 
[3]  On objections to Holocaust fiction, see Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction: From William Styron to Benjamin Wilkomirski (New York: Routledge, 2000).  For  William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner and the resulting controversy, see Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Ashraf Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[4] Valerie Martin, "Truth or Whoppers: On Writing Historical Fiction," The Writer's Chronicle 38.4 (Feb. 2006): 38. 

Comments

[profsynecdoche]

For what it's worth, this post recalled to me a recent conversation I had on an airport shuttle to a conference (in Western history). I ended up sitting next to a historical novelist who had just finished a series related to the Lewis and Clark expedition (that I have not read). I was fresh from my graduate seminar on history and fantasy, full of Hayden White and Freud, and have always thought about historical fiction much the way you do. However, it became clear to me that this novelist was devoted to truth both on the level of factual accuracy and the level of emotion. She thought she produced something "true" about history by placing facts into a novelistic narrative and supplying an inner life to her characters that was not explicit in the historical characters. One could argue that this is a naive understanding of historical fiction, but it was clearly also part of the generic compact for her and her readers.

[Bourgeois Nerd]

I have to admit to using historical fiction as a source of information, which I know is dangerous at the best of times. But I do seem to gravitate towards historical fiction authored by those that are quite diligent about telling what is historical and what is not (Steven Saylor, one of my favorite authors, does this). And I often use historical fiction as a jumping off point for more serious historical investigation. But, still, I must confess that many of my prejudices (for instance, a distate for Cicero as a self-aggrandizing opportunist, a la Saylor) remain those of the author I happen to read. I realize this - hopefully -, but I think a lot of other people don't.

[Andre Mayer]

Profsynecdoche's comment is very much to the point. The past being another country, history can be used, like geography, to set a story that may be timeless or presentist. But the more sophisticated historical novels do what R.G. Collingwood considered to be the essence of the historian's role: recreate the thought and state of mind of people who lived in other times. The psychological "truth" -- defined as emotional plausibility consistent with historical knowledge -- is what counts in these cases. (Films of historical events, like films of novels, must be allowed to compress and heighten events -- otherwise they'd take place in real time.)

One important distinction, it seems to me, is between historical fiction about fictional characters (often with real figures in "walk-on" parts) and fiction that attempts in-depth portrayal of real people. There's a difference between, say, "accurate" portrayals of a common soldier in Napoleon's Russian campaign, and of Napoleon.

[Michelle]

Why are we such sticklers for historical accuracy in this day and age? Shakespeare's works are riddled with historical inaccuracies, but yet he's still considered one of the great giants of literature. I rarely hear of anyone nit-picking over his anachronisms (although someone might have--I'm no longer part of the "academy" and didn't specialize in Shakespeare then). It seems to me that the importance of a work's historical accuracy dwindles over time (eventually to nothing). At best, I think it's helpful to study the inaccuracies because they show us the particular climate, attitude, and culture in which that work was produced.