 History: The Past and FictionbyGillian Polack
One of my lifelong fascinations is finding out how accurate the history has to be in historical novels in order for the novels to work for readers. I love gauging the opinions of reader-friends and reviewers and comparing these opinions with what I know of the background. Many readers really care about the accuracy of small details in historical novels, I]ve found. They don’t just rely on them for creating colour in fiction and making the story come alive: they read the novel because they love history and they fully expect that the world of the novel will fuel their addiction by providing data about the past as well as giving them a story and characters to take pleasure in. The number of people I encounter who become really angry when they discover inaccuracies in a novel increases year by year. I’m happy with that because I’m an historian and I can’t help recognising that most peoples’ understanding of our shared past comes through various types of fiction and popular writing. Not everyone finds archaeological field reports fun, or analyses of the data in municipal archives fascinating. Their love of accuracy in depiction of the past is a wonderful thing in so many ways. The reality of writing is that novels can’t present a complete past. Novels are narrative; they are story. They can present a single (or even several) approaches to incidents and places and people that lend themselves to narrative. They can never present the minutiae that makes up the wonder of works by scholars such as J Ambrose Raftis in his book Warboys: Two Hundred Years in the Life of an English Mediaeval Village. Warboys is a really solid book, in several senses of the word. It had data about the life of a village, about the level of information that survives about a given village for a given period, about approaches to scholarship. It does not, however, entertain in the way Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of Witching Hill (my example-book-of-the-day) does. Sharratt’s novel takes us into the life of a seventeenth-century family, right until the day our favourites are put to death as witches. In fact, it should not entertain in the way Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of Witching Hill does. It is an entirely different type of writing about history and has entirely different functions. This is a good thing, for both books and for readers. I’m not going to talk about Warboys. I included it simply to mislead you (and for an excuse to take it off the shelf and browse a little). In fact, what fascinates me today is the world drawn by Sharratt. I’d like to explore techniques she uses to make the history of the Pendle witches feel alive enough for readers and enjoy the book a second time round in the process. I’d also like to be a bit unorthodox in how I explore those techniques. Most of us are interested in the precise level of historical accuracy. Today, however, I’m interested in how Sharratt convinces her readers that what she writes is real. This is not a matter of capturing raw data and explaining it or weaving it into the narrative. What interests me today is how the effect of a perfectly accurate and truthful past can be achieved by other means than data provision. This doesn’t mean that Sharratt hasn’t done her historical homework. She obviously has. I don’t agree with all her interpretations (a barrel of wine drunk at a wedding struck an off-note with me, for instance), but she maintains the sense of the period and place partly because of the groundwork she did using historical sources. That’s not how she communicates the past, however. That’s the groundwork she laid and on which she painted her particular past. I’m interested in discovering how Sharratt (and many other writers) keeps the reader’s attention while writing about something that’s quite alien. In bad historical fiction and fantasy, the reader realises it’s alien or realises that the writer has made an historical error or focuses on certain details at the expense of others: they get thrown out of the narrative and lose the feeling of being immersed in another reality. If I had a whiteboard, I would draw excruciatingly bad pictures of a cartoon. Since I have no whiteboard, I’d like you to do the work for me. Think of the drawn boxes closing each section of a cartoon. One box is full of pictures and a bit of text and tells us a bit of the story and then your eye moves to the next box and the next and soon you’re caught up in the story and you forget that you’re looking at cartoons and that there’s really not that much detail. Your eye gets accustomed to translating between the simplicity of the drawing and the complexity of the tale and characters and you as a reader get accustomed to filling in the huge gap between them. This is what the best graphic novels do. I might write about them specifically one day. What I want to explore now is the way pictures lead us into filling in gaps and working out what the story should be. Good pictures force us to take a role and a stance and participate and interpret. Cartoons take things one step further and make us participants (as observers) in the story that’s being told. We start liking and disliking characters and getting angry when things don’t go the way we expect. Our participation in the story leads to us caring about the characters of the story and about their fates. This is exactly what novelists do. They create a relationship between us and the world of the book, and we care. A friend and I explored an exhibition of French art recently (hi Marg!) and I took some notes of how the work of the artists related to the work of Sharratt in her novel. Camille Pissarro’s Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu 1888 was one of my favourite paintings because it paralleled what I wanted to say (lousy reason to love fine art, I know). When I look at Pissarro’s painting I note the roughness of the wood and the heat of the fire and the coarse chapped hands of the peasant girl. I do it without noticing that he hasn’t actually painted these things at that level. Sharratt doesn’t really have extraordinary amounts of historical detail. She walks her key characters, Bess and Alizon, through their daily lives and shows us just a fraction of what they would see. We don’t know everything about the world of the people of Pendle. She draws us the forest and the fields and the houses and the people as they come into contact with the woman and her granddaughter and we fill in the bits we understand—just as I did for Pissarro’s painting. We see the shape of Pissarro’s peasant's clothes and our mind’s eye fills in the feel of the shoes and the heft and feel and drape of the dress for ourselves. “For ourselves” is the crucial bit—we develop a personal understanding gleaned from what we know (or think we know) about the place and time, drawn from our own life experiences and knowledge. It’s harder for novelists. The society Sharratt depicts is a poor one and a judgemental one and what we see through the women’s eyes is how people treat them: the slighting comment and the kindly look while in their minds we hear the calculation of what this means in terms of sustenance. While most of us have personal experiences of being judged for something and treated badly or negligently, the fact that we’re readers and have the privilege of literacy and mostly live in well-off societies means that the likelihood of starving to death is not high. There are things we can’t experience (in addition to starving) and that Sharratt has to work hard to have us imagine. She does this by using the first person. We are inside the minds of her characters. Pissarro can’t do that. A painter'’ narrative is always third person even if the painter appears in his or her own painting. Sharratt communicates the humiliation of begging and the desperation of a life that depends on handouts through showing us how much it hurts. The emotions of her characters and their reactions to life’s more interesting moments are how she communicates the depths of the past. Emotions are her painter’s brush for the aspects of her past that are outside our reach. They are the tools that enable us to feel the heat of that fire and the chapped hands. Other painters have other lessons for interpreting historical fiction. Paul Signac’s paintings, for instance, have intense light. One particular one I was admiring used contrasting pinks and blues with yellow and orange. Up close, all I saw were the colours. There was no intense light. Just colours scrapping with other colours. From a distance, the colours don’t fight. They work together to show us light infusing a Mediterranean sea-scene. It’s still not naturalistic. We don’t expect it to be naturalistic. Historical fiction writers are—for the most part—expected to infuse their canvas with intense light. It’s one of the reasons we read about history through fiction. The setting is expected to be just as strong and just as full of light. Most of the time it’s expected to have a sense of realism. Not always. Certain themes are permitted to spill over into luminosity or the strange. Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose and Sarah Maitland in Company of Liars both manage this spillover. One of the strengths of historical fiction in general, however, isn’t luminosity—it’s the sense of the past as real and the stories as believable. Pendle uses her first person narrative to achieve this reality, in one way, through letting us see through someone else’s eyes. In another way, however, the fact that her narrators use modern English and modern thinking provides an effect that’s quite similar to Signac’s colours fighting when examined closely. If we focus on the writing style in the first person, then Sharratt’s narrative is super-real, just like Signac’s painting. Once we settle into the narrative and accept the style as a mediation between the past and the present, then the sense of the super-real fades and the narrative simply serves as a bridge for us into the story and into the world of the story, which just happens to be in our past. The bottom line, then, is not how clever the techniques are, whether they’re in writing or in painting, it’s whether this bridge happens, whether we can enjoy the painting or the novel as it is supposed to be enjoyed. Whether we can participate. I could follow the painting/writing link for longer and talk about how Seurat breaks a picture into its component colours and how writers break history down into the parts that are needed and reshape it, but that’s a big subject. I’ll talk about it another time, using different illustrations, perhaps. Today, my big idea is that successful painters and writers use a wide range of techniques to communicate with the watcher and reader and make them complicit in the art and make them share the art and make the complete the story. When Sharratt's Bess and Alizon talk, they’re talking to us and bringing the story of the women of Pendle to life in a way that we can understand because we have become a part of their story. Books mentioned in this column:
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