fter failing so miserably to get my point understood in my post "Mistake Amateur Reviewers Make" understood, this time I am just going to ask the question, not opine on my own behalf. For the record, I was not talking about authors in that post but in essence saying that good books should not be subjected to bad amateur reviewers. OK, 'nuff said. Now on to the debate inadvertently raised by that post.
THE QUESTION: What level of historical accuracy should a novel be held to?
The Positions: None
My oft-quoted (by me)husband would probably say that fiction is ficrion and readers should just understand that. He would say that to demand absolute accuracy is impossible, that for any number of reasons, the fact that history itself is often fiction, the fact that the whole point of a novel is to interpret and to put words in historical figures' mouths, absolute slavish accuracy is not an appropriate goal. He's on one extreme of this debate, and all I will say about that is that I don't agree with him that accuracy is not important at all.
The Positions: Complete Accuracy
The other extreme, the group I called accuracy nerds in my early post, is the other extreme. They will quibble with anything, everything, and often for reasons of their own. They insist that even words that entered the language later than a period should not be used, no matter how little later.
You, dear reader, probably fall somewhere in between these extremes. I do as well. You understand that a historical novel cannot, by definition, meet the standards of historical nonfiction. It is supposed to be an interpretation of what really happened. It is, like all fiction, speculative, guessing at what might have been one person's nature, another person's feelings, and another person's motivation. Nevertheless you have standards for what may be interpreted and what must conform to the record.
So that's question. What must conform? What might one legitimately dither with, what must adhere to known facts?
Susan Higginbotham, author of The Traitor's Wife and Hugh and Bess, offered this to the discussion via comments on the earlier post:
I agree fully that one shouldn't let one's personal prejudices color a review and that writers have to fill in gaps and do a certain amount of interpretation. But having characters alive and kicking five years after they died, or adding or subtracting twenty years from a historical person's known age, or confusing a historical person with his grandfather by the same name or title isn't interpretation, it's just plain sloppy. Worse, it just gives people who hate historical fiction another weapon with which to criticize the genre.
Use the comments section of this post to register your position.
Thank you to all who debated the reviewer post and who are ready to make their points here as well.
For me as a reader of historical fiction one of the delights of the genre is seeing how different authors portray the real historical figures they write about. Look at all the different depictions of Piers Gaveston, Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, etc. It would be rather dull if each one were the same cookie-cutter characters spouting only the historically documented lines. As an author, for me to take on a project I have to feel I can bring something special or different to it. I don't do this just to tell the reader what they can find in an encyclopedia.
ReplyDeleteAs for accuracy, I admit that anything that disrupts the flow, jars me out of the story annoys me. For instance, I read a novel set in Biblical times recently where some witnesses to a crucifixion use some rather modern slang such as "kid" and "chat," it read as awkward and distinctly out of place.
For the record - my own response. Probably not what you decided I think.
ReplyDeleteI agree wholeheartedly with what Augustina and several of you said. Historical accuracy is vital. Wherever a fact is truly known it is the responsibility of the author to stick to it unless it is so trivial it doesn't matter to the story.. and even then the author should fess up. I nodded approvingly when in the author's note for Lords of the White castle Chadwick informed the reader she had changed the order of when her heroine was in one place or another.. she made the right literary call and was also responsible about noting what she had done. That was the best thing to do.
I support the call for maximum accuracy. I have a proviso. An awful lot of "history" is already fiction. Those critics who rely n specious sources get no support from me... and sometimes the best intentioned are nevertheless wrong For years scholars used as primary sources a correspondence between Ivan the Terrible nd a childhood friend.. which turned out to be forgeries. I suggest we try to be humble about how accurate we can be even in the best of situations. That's one reason the I get so ticked at some reviewers who seem to think they have the corner on knowledge or morality or insight. Balderdash.
I also reserve the right to interpret where there is no incontrovertible proof one way or another and to interpret what historians of the past said based on my judgment of their motivations. The last historian I am going to credit is a churchman talking about women's lives.
Well, I think that must be properly referenced to make a novel because hstoria ideally move the reader to the time and if there were characters should also be adapted to a certain part of history and things typical of the time.
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