Real People in Historical Fiction Discussion Post

[tarigwaemir]

For those of you who still haven't posted yet for this round of bibliophages, you have until Friday! Even if you haven't finished a book from the list you were assigned, you can always post your thoughts on what you've read so far.

In the meantime, some thoughts to kickstart a general discussion on this round's theme: real people in historical fiction.

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But if figures are well known, then the author is released from the burden of portraying them accurately, because if the reader doesn't like the "characterization" he or she can just read another book. Also because the reader can be expected to know (or to be able to figure out later) which parts are "real" and which are made up just for fun.

...Maybe instead of "accurately," I should say "throroughly". An author writing about someone for the first time really has to go out of the way to provide an interpretation. Whether that interpretation based on all of the availible evidence, or a pet theory, or just what would make the most interesting story is up to the author.

Talking about the "obligation" to be accurate, I had a bad reaction to Julia Alvarez's Time of the Butterflies because I read it expecting to be educated about the Mirabal sisters. (The book was assigned for class.) But was that fair? The Mirabals aren't well known in the US, but they are SUPER famous in Latin America, particularly in the Dominican Republic. Was Alvarez' first obligation to her ignorant American readers -- so no taking liberties with the story -- or was it to her familiar Dominican readers -- so it's more important to preserve the mythology? Or was it to herself -- to write a good story? The book was originally written in English, and Alvarez admits that she didn't always sweat the details, even getting some geography wrong.

Are writers from "periphery" countries who are writing for a "center" audience obliged to present their material in an a helpful, educative way? Put that way the answer is obviously not....but I think there's still the expectation, somewhere, that they should.

This is sort of a side issue to the "how accurate does historical fiction have to be" question.

"Reality is more unbelievable than fantasy": AGREED. Not just because real people can be even weirder and more extreme than fictional people, but because sometimes stories fit too well into a narrative -- like a British solidier gets leave to come home from WWI for Christmas but dies in a carriage accident on Christmas Eve -- a story like this would be "cheesy," but these things actually do happen.

Off to think about questions 2 and 3. Really great post, Tari.