Bittercon links: AH

[sartorias]

brisingamen finishes up her Bittercon questions with one about fiction and history.

This paragraph will be running through my mind as I do the morning chores in a minute or two, here.

To be a trifle provocative, I might just start by asking what the difference is between history and fiction anyway, given that both seem to me to be all about the narrative,

Comments

[madrobins]

So when we flirt with alternative history, just what are we doing?In most cases we're rearranging furniture

[sartorias]

Yes . . . and it makes sense.

Finally it comes down to whether or not the reader is convinced--whether or not the historian, or storyteller (story being the central concept in both those words) has given convincing detail.

A lot of ah's toss me out because I'm not convinced, the "but what if?" chain reactions overwhelm me so much I'm tossed out of the story they want to tell. If it seems the author has addressed the what ifs in a way that convinces or delights me and keeps me questioning, I get drawn in. And I find that true of history as well as fiction. The thing about getting old, and having read a lot is, one accrues more and more detail so that it is tougher to be convinced. But the payoff is sure fun.

[swan_tower]

And secret history is trying to put some more furniture in the room without moving any of the pieces already there, or having the result look uncomfortably crowded.

[madrobins]

Oh, yes! Brilliant!

[sizztheseed]

Seems to me there is a good reason the Ancient Greeks put both History and Medicine in the "arts" category. We moderns could probably learn something from that.

[sartorias]

Oh, very good point.

[annikah]

Oh my, instantly recent discussions regarding truth, sources, and Froissart's Chronicles fill my head. And just this morning I read the introduction to Walsingham's Chronica Majora and it implicitly raised a similar question by mentioning that Walsingham preferred to put information he gathered from paper sources into the mouths of figures as reported speech, even though he was never there or may not have had an eye-witness account. Yet Walsingham, and Froissart, has been used for centuries as a (mostly) reliable historical source. And how long was Geoffrey of Monmouth taken seriously; today, can we always tell which kings he made up and which have basis in fact?

Maybe not alternative history so much, but certainly historical fiction follows in the footsteps of ancient writers who did not have a clear division between fiction and history.

[sartorias]

I think we have a clue to how seriously many took those speeches put into the mouths of historical figures in seventeen year old Catherine's bitter complaint about the boredom of reading history, early on in Northanger Abbey.

Still, it's a point well worth considering. Another thing that was popular was dating your "factoids" as known centuries before.

[annikah]

Sure. It's been a while since I last took a historiography course, but I remember getting the sense that with the development of the modern scientific method, by the Regency period historians were beginning to think of themselves in more scientific terms, and so history as a field began to take a different course than it had previously. The emphasis shifted to veracity of fact instead of "sense," and it wasn't okay to use your imagination to fill in the gaps.

[sartorias]

A proper historian could pinpoint facts and dates, but the impression I get is that tracing facts began with Xenophon, who tried to check the sources for his histories. And this idea got new life when the shift between the classic paradigm and the medieval was highlighted by the rediscovery of the classics, around the 1300s, Petrarch, etc.

Two results: one, people plumped up their rhetorical discourse by claiming their points were made by the ancients, and others searched the ancients for corroborative facts.