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Projecting yourself into minds from a different era isn’t easy. It takes a willing suspension of beliefs and assumptions to understand why people did what they did. This ability to detach from your own mindset is called historical imagination.
In historical fiction, anachronism is almost inevitable. The author confronts not only personal perspective but also the need to connect with modern readers. Diana Gabaldon does this brilliantly in Outlander by approaching 18th-century Scotland through the eyes of an Englishwoman from the 1940s, not exactly today but near enough for readers to relate. Barring time travel, in any novel set long ago it’s a sure bet that the good guys will be those whose values are most like ours. Contrary to what the word “imagination” might suggest, historical imagination is most important in nonfiction history. It helps reveal misleading sources, forgeries, and faulty interpretation. Consider the modern “rehabilitation” of King Richard III of England, the final loser of the Wars of the Roses. Was he the vicious tyrant of Shakespeare’s historical drama, who murdered his young nephews to secure the throne? Or the innocent paragon of recent popular culture, unjustly maligned by the true villains? It takes a feat of imagination to step back from the saint-or-monster debate into the mindset of that violent age, when probable death awaited any unsuccessful contender for the throne, including Richard.
7 Comments
Lisa Imhoff
4/22/2016 06:53:42 pm
Sarah, these are also waters which genealogical writers must confront and navigate. We are historical writers of a sort, but we are not the people we write about, so what do we REALLY know? Is it even fair of us to evaluate their lives, sometimes dozens or hundreds of years later? Interesting stuff. Lisa, thanks for pointing out this connection. Yes, genealogical writers are historians of a sort, and perhaps also biographers of a family. I would guess it could take a lot of historical imagination to go beyond filling out family trees to figuring out (or making a best guess at) what they mean. The information you find and where you find it - ships' registers, burial plots - might point toward fascinating stories you can half discover, half surmise.
Lisa Imhoff
4/23/2016 08:41:02 am
Precisely. Even when I read fiction, I am keenly aware of who is telling the story, and search as I read for why they want to tell us this story. And yet I have become less and less judgmental and try NOT to force myself to love all my ancestors and to make them all be just like me. That said, it's easy to do in my mind but not so easy to do "on paper."
Lisa
4/26/2016 01:10:06 pm
Well, hmmmm. More champagne and a dab of that artichoke dip please. Now. If I am telling the story, judgement and understanding go together — to the best of my ability. If someone else is telling the story, I HOPE their judgement and understanding go together, but they may not, or not the way I can judge and understand the same (historic) person because I'll be fed only a bit of the story, the part the researcher/author wants me to have. And what the researcher presents may well be colored by their judgement... right? Real or fictional, living or historical, people always give just a bit of their story. My history professors taught there's no such thing as history without bias; at the very least, the writer has to choose which facts to include and in what order. But can't we sometimes become less judgmental as we understand more about why people did what they did?
Lisa
4/26/2016 04:01:38 pm
I never had very good or broad-minded history teachers. Yes, we SHOULD be less judgmental but I fear it is nearly impossible. But that's what makes reading so great! Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. Archives
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