Basically, anything we read is going to fundamentally consist of a bunch of ideas that exist in some author's head somewhere, that they've tried to articulate in whatever way they think is going to express those ideas the best. That goes for any written thing, really, from a history book to song lyrics to a novel to a blog post to a tax form. There are only really two variables: which ideas are being expressed, and how the author is expressing them. Ideally, we like to think that in a history book, the ideas being transmitted are the objective fact of something that could theoretically at one point have been observed, and maybe an interpretation of those events that comes as close to an even-handed look at the exact provable effects of everything that's being written about, and the way the book is written is just to be as clear and evocative as possible, to make sure the reader understands exactly what the author is saying. By comparison, fiction authors are "allowed" to make more biased interpretations; the ideas they're expressing are supposed to be shaped and muddled by all the other things going on inside the author's hide, to the extent that they're even allowed to put down words in combinations that make the reader imagine things that haven't happened and never could happen.
The image I've been working with to explain how writing works is to image the writer's brain as sort of a reverse of the Dark Side Of The Moon-type prism, where instead of a beam of light getting broken into individual colors, it's individual beams of information or context entering into the author's head, and one clear idea emerging. For a historical writer, the brain is supposed to just act as a smooth, clear medium to focus all the little bits of historical fact into one cohesive narrative that explains them in a totally objective way, unaffected by the material they have to pass through. In fiction it's expected instead that the author's head is full of unproven personal assumptions and biases that twist and bend the original, factual information into an interesting but fundamentally not "true" set of assertions and ideas. In both cases that single beam is what the author then shapes into the words that best serve the purpose of their concept. The problem with this assumption is that no human being has a brain made of totally clear, defectless glass; you just can't try to interpret something without adding your own personal spin on the story. Just the act of narrowing down an enormous flood of information into something a non-expert can digest will necessarily expose the author's own beliefs about what matters and what doesn't, and actually attaching meaning to the fact puree is never going to be an objective process -- no one could possibly know exactly what causes what in the infinite numbers of essentially random processes that make up day-to-day life. That's because no matter how dedicated an author may be, they aren't going to live their life consuming only pure, undiluted historical knowledge; there are going to be millions of other little beams of context coming from every other source in their life, from the time they were born to the time they die, that will muddle the historical narrative almost as much as the purposefully muddled fictional one.
Since it's impossible to get an actual objective (ie unaffected by a human context) source for anything, the next-best thing seems to be just to accept that impossibility, and to try to consume information with the understanding that what you're seeing is less that clear beam of truth, and more a messy imprint of the inside of some other human being's head.
I definitely see the distinction between the leeway a reader is willing to grant a writer of fiction over a writer of history, but maybe these discourses are more closely linked than they appear even in this formulation. "Ideas" are at work in both, no doubt, but a historian, we might say, is particularly anchored to the facts and what they will allow him or her to say. The is a story "there" that the writer is beholden to, and their "ideas" are limited to what that story allows. But we have quite similar expectations w/r/t realistic fiction--the facts of life as we know it, certain social conditions, emotional tendencies, psychological features, etc. We want a certain coherence and plausibility that isn't that far removed from what we want out of nonfiction.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the rules/conventions are more fluid with fiction, and experimental writers like Doctorow or Reed can attempt all kinds of tweaks that wouldn't go over well in a traditional history.