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"Don't make stuff up." That's what my friend Amanda Seligman advised in a response to my Facebook status update about pondering the line between history and fiction. 
She's right, of course. I'm a historian and I can't just make stuff up. Historians muster evidence (from documents, usually) and carefully show how that evidence supports their conclusions. If we made up our evidence, we would be violating the implicit contract we make with our readers who trust us to draw reasonable conclusions from texts and sources that actually exist. Making sh*t up is contrary to the standards of professional conduct for historians. Period. As Monika Otter correctly noted, however, I was asking about history and fiction in a different way. I'm writing about a man (Limoux) known through only a single source, an inquisitorial deposition of about 3,000 words (in Latin). And I'm writing a whole book! I thought at first it was going to be an article, but it just kept expanding. This is one of the richest sources I have ever worked on, and it sends tentacles out in all kinds of directions, most of them fascinating. Those of you who have spoken with me about Limoux know that I refer to him frequently as "urine dude" - and that's only one direction. I now know a lot about urine, just to name only one of the strange topics I have recently been researching. Limoux has always reminded me of Menocchio...
So I've been reading around, thinking about this problem. David Hackett Fischer spoke at Middlebury a couple of years ago and made a case for historians to be better writers (well, that's not exactly what he said, but sort of...). He himself is a wonderfully vivid and compelling writer, whose Paul Revere's Ride, for instance, is a riveting, minute by minute, field by field history of that famous night. I loved the book from the minute my brother Robert loaned it to me -- in part because I grew up only a couple of miles from the meadow where the man himself was captured and thus knew the places Fischer was writing about, and in part because it was simply a very good read. It is full of detail (p. 107):
Suddenly the mood was shattered. It would have been the horse that noticed first, as horses often do. A rider as experienced as Paul Revere would instantly have seen the animal's head come up, and her ears prick forward, and her high-arched neck twist slightly from side to side as she came alert to danger. He would have felt a momentary break in the rhythm of the canter, a change in the tension of the reins, and a subtle shift of pressure beneath his seat.In the endnotes for this chapter ("The Warning: The Midnight Ride as Collective Effort") Fischer cites diaries, journals, letters, depositions, geneaological research, archival material, surviving artifacts, articles in Sky and Telescope and Astronomy, earlier histories both broad in scope (William Gordon, History of the Independence of the United States, 4 vols., London, 1788) and pointed (William W. Wheildon, History of Paul Revere's Signal Lanterns, Boston, 1878), as well as simple common sense ("It would have been dangerous to light the lanterns on the ground floor of the church, with British soldiers passing in the street, and impossible to light them at the top of a narrow ladder"). There is a lot of material out there about the night of April 18-19, 1775... The unusual moonshadow that evening is documentable astronomically. We know what the Regulars would have been wearing. We know how a good horse behaves (and we know that Deacon Larkin's horse Brown Beauty was a seriously good horse). But this passage goes a little further, I think, to good dramatic effect. It's decidely not fiction... but have the dramatization, the conjectures gone too far? The evidence is there, in his endnotes, but he wears his scholarship lightly.
Paul Revere searched the road ahead. Suddenly, he saw two horsemen in the distance, almost invisible, waiting silent and motionless in the moonshadow of a great tree by the edge of the highway. As Revere rode closer, he made out the blur of military cockades on their hats, and the bulge of heavy holsters at their hips.
Regulars!
He pulled sharply on his reins, and Deacon Larkin's horse responded instantly....
The medievalist, of course, has an even more intractable problem in writing like this. I don't have and will never have the range of primary source material that Fischer does. His deposition is all I have about him personally. I have a great deal more "around" him, you might say. I have been trying to write about two "scenes" this week: the first is the series of events that led Limoux to his revelations, and the second is the narrative of his interrogation. I'll write about the problems of the revelations in another post.
He was taken and questioned about this sacrament, and refusing to respond, and turning himself to other words, and stories, at first he was dismissed to go, having been called to appear and to swear on the Holy Gospel of God about these first things, and also about other serious things, he was again denounced and captured.This laconic text reveals that that at first his interrogators thought he was crazy and dismissed him, before calling him back after he was denounced again. I know inquisitorial procedure and I know the name of the bishop before whom he appeared. I have been to the tiny town (Alet-les-Bains) where the newly-formed diocese was based and know that the "cathedral" was really an abbey church. I can tell the story. But how can I describe the extraordinary impression he must have made without veering too far into conjecture, getting too close to fiction? I could turn it into a novel, if I were gifted that way. But I am a historian, not a novelist, and I want to be historically and archivally responsible, without boring the reader. Inquisitorial depositions were not written down in order to make good stories, and I know it is my job to squeeze them for every last drop of juice, to unpack them as fully as they can be unpacked.
I'm struggling a lot with finding the narrative voice that will allow me to do this effectively. I am interested in exploring models besides David Hackett Fischer for how to write vivid, historically responsible prose. They don't have to be medieval. Suggestions are welcome.
4 comments:
I read a book for class this spring that I think did an excellent job with engaging, imaginative prose - but I also think it crossed the line once or twice in terms of making stuff up. (Or at least in stretching some thin sources further than they really ought to have gone.) Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett.
I think that when dealing with an extremely limited source, the best literary writing comes from putting it into context - from teasing out the small details of the world around that source, and your subject. Similar to what Fischer did in describing Revere's horse's reaction. Equine behavior has not changed since the 18th century - or since the middle ages, for that matter. So he could use that as another source, to add color and context.
Thanks, Amanda -- I've ordered it. And I picked that particular passage thinking of you, hoping you would comment on it. Wouldn't it be nice if it were as easy to understand human behavior as equine behavior? That kind of teasing out is exactly what I'm trying to do. But what about the dramatic "Regulars!"?
Do you know Jonathan Spence's books about China? He has experimented a lot with ways to tell the story, including more interpretive modes.
The exclamatory "Regulars!" is a little much for me, I confess, but that has more to do with literary stylings than historical accuracy, I think.
I always like small details that mean I can connect with a passage. In this case, it was the horse, but it might be something else that remains constant over the years, or is at least easily interpreted and not necessarily subjective. Food, for example, or building techniques, the description of the physical space around an action. One of the things the Cohen book did well, I thought, was to really bring out a lot of the atmosphere of New York at the time - she researched not just the ownership of the brothel, but also of the other houses on the block, to see what kind of neighbors were hanging around. When someone writes the story of my life they probably won't think that sort of thing is interesting, and yet right now my downstairs neighbor's low tolerance for any kind of noise ever is governing certain of my life choices...
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