A Middle Way
I’ve been thinking about realism in historical fiction recently as a result of a discussion on the Macaronis yahoo group in which I was in the unusual position of arguing for less of it.
I do think that my opinions about realism versus fantasy in fiction have shifted a little towards the middle, so I’m going to subject you to me thinking out loud about what has changed in my head and why.
I’ve been reading a lot of Age of Sail romance recently, and have noticed that many of the books which I have found difficult to read because of the lack of historical realism are still books which are thoroughly enjoyed by some romance readers. I wondered how that could be. Didn’t they care about realism or quality? Did they want only wallpaper history? Did they actively prefer stories in which the unpleasant things about the past were brushed under the rug? What was going on?
Last weekend I went to the re-enactor’s market up near Coventry, and it occurred to me that re-enacting was like historical fiction in the way that re-enactors attempt to portray people from other historical periods but can never get away from the fact that they are, underneath, as 21st century as anyone else.
We drive to shows, we wear modern underwear, we sleep on modern camp beds and bring out the camping gas stoves in the evening to make our instant coffee. Some of us (heresy) machine sew the invisible parts of our clothes and only hand sew the bits you can see. And we have modern ways of looking at the world and understanding things, which we have to painstakingly put aside in order to try and see things as our ancestors would.
In addition to my 18th Century group, the Mannered Mob, I belong to a re-enactment society called Regia Anglorum, which recreates life during the Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods:
Both of these societies are well known in their respective fields for the extreme seriousness with which they take the idea of presenting an accurate picture of their period of choice to the public. Both have officers whose job it is to check people over to make sure they are not wearing or using or being seen with any out of period artefact, even if that’s as easy for the public to miss as rubber soles on your shoes.
One of Regia’s clothing rules is that black clothing is right out. No one gets to wear black. This isn’t in fact strictly historically accurate. It is possible to dye cloth a dense black with the methods available at the time. But it was extremely expensive and it was not at all colour fast, so it rapidly faded to grey. The society’s rule is in place because, before they had that rule, everyone said “oh, but they could produce black cloth, so I’m doing nothing wrong” and everyone wore black. With the result that, overall, the society ended up giving a false impression of the kind of clothes that would be in general use at the time.
In the same way, the Mannered Mob is well aware that there were some women in Georgian society who disguised themselves as men and entered the Army or Navy. It would be historically accurate if they were to allow their female members to cross dress in this way. But they don’t. And they don’t for the same reason as Regia – because if they did, everyone would do it, and the overall level of realism would go down.
So what’s this got to do with fiction?
Well, what this made me think about was that (another heresy coming up) possibly strict accuracy was not what fiction is actually aiming for. After all, to realistically portray even a contemporary event, we would have to include the parts where the main characters went to the toilet, spent five hours playing Farmville because it was Sunday and they were bored, spent six hours of their day every day at their job and the remainder worrying about their bills. Even contemporary fiction abstracts from the real world only those things which make a good story. It just presents them in a way where the reader doesn’t even notice they’ve gone. It gets across the impression of contemporary life, while actually severely restricting and re-ordering incidents in a way that never would happen in real life.
That goes double for historical fiction. Realism might seem to demand that the story be told in the original language. My Saxon freedom fighters should be speaking Old English. But then the modern reader wouldn’t understand them at all.
My 18th Century gentlemen, if they’re going to be typical of their breed, should be fat, have bad teeth and the pox, keep slaves, cheat on their wives as a matter of course, loathe sodomites and enjoy nothing better than a public execution.
But, frankly, then they wouldn’t be very heroic. Of course, I could write heroes who are the embodiment of every modern virtue, and excuse those heroes by saying “well, some people in the 18th Century had surprisingly modern attitudes.” And that’s true. But in a way, it’s like the black cloth. If you’re going to do it at all, you have to do it sparingly or you give a false impression. Some middle way is required – a way to write heroes who are men of their time and yet still sympathetic, likable characters.
So I think the aim in fiction, as it is in re-enactment, is not complete re-creation. I think that it is to create verisimilitude. To keep the past and present in the kind of dialog where they’re working together to create an impression that “it could have been just like this.” To give the reader enough detail, enough accuracy and enough flavour of the period so that they feel they are really there. And to do that without either giving a false impression of the historical period, or damaging the flow of the story, so that they not only feel they are really there, but they’re having a whale of a time while they’re at it.
That brings me back to the puzzle I talked about at the beginning: Why are some readers so tolerant of such a low standard of historical accuracy in fiction, whereas some throw the book at the wall if the writer gets the thread count of the knotwork on the character’s epaulette wrong?
Well, verisimilitude is one of those things that depends as much on the reader as it does on the thing being read. Suppose your reader is someone who loves romance, doesn’t care that much about history and has a powerful imagination of their own. It isn’t going to take much historical detail to create an impression of verisimilitude for that reader. Throw in a cutlass and everyone saying “yarrr” and their imagination has probably already leaped in to supply the rest, leaving them happily transported to their vision of what it must have been like on a pirate ship. The reader is still experiencing that feeling of being swept away to a different time—it just didn’t take a lot of effort on the part of the writer to achieve that.
The problem for the historical romance writer is that while it is easy to create an impression of a cool historical setting for readers who are prepared to suspend much of their own disbelief, some readers are reading historical romance because they like to learn about the history as well as the romance, and those readers already know a lot and expect the writer to know more.
For those readers, creating the illusion that they are right there in that historical time is going to take a lot more historical accuracy from the writer. Those readers are the ones for whom it’s necessary to check your facts and get your details right.
The more an author knows about a historical period, the more of those picky, knowledgeable historical readers he or she can sweep away under the enchantment of “I feel like I’m really there”. The trick, of course, is to do it without turning off the reader who doesn’t like history and is only in it for the love story.
If you can suspend the disbelief of both sets of readers and give both of them a satisfying love story too, well, you’ll have twice the readers. If you’re a writer who doesn’t particularly care about the historical details and only wants the atmosphere of the time, it’s still got to be worth putting in that extra bit of historical research, because it will mean that your stories appeal to a whole new audience.
April 2, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Interesting about the Mannered Mob’s rule about not allowing women to dress as men for the reenactments. Like you say, if they allowed it, the whole thing would end up as some reenactors version of Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment, where pretty much the entire army the heroine joins while disguised as a boy is all women disguised as men.
I suppose to properly reflect the experiences of those women who did serve while passing as men a woman would have to join the society disguised as a 21st century man and convince them she was and then do the reenactment in men’s clothes. Hmm… plot bunny! 
For me, I generally wouldn’t know enough about the period to know if every single tiny detail is correct. But on the other hand, easily checked details being wrong would be almost instantly fatal to at least part of my enjoyment. Not that I wouldn’t finish the book, but part of me would always be thinking “if you got that wrong, what else are you talking BS about?” I’d kind of lose faith in the writer, that they didn’t care enough to check fairly widely known historical facts. For example I read one not long back where “Wellington” was referred to, before he became Lord of the Duke of Wellington and it niggled at me for the rest of the book. It’s so easily checked! I knew it just from watching Sharpe!
Speaking of Sharpe, or rather Bernard Cornwell, I think his books show that if you know the history as well as he does and can include enough detail and texture to really immerse the reader in the period, then you can bend some facts to the demands of fiction, without losing the faith of the reader. Because the reader knows you’re doing it mindfully, not just getting it wrong.
April 2, 2010 at 4:40 pm
That’s exactly right – it would have been a lot like the Monstrous Regiment
We tried to get them to bend the rules for Ailith, because she never wears girl’s clothes and has always passed as a boy since she began to choose her own clothes, but we’d made the mistake of having told them she was a girl to start off with and they wouldn’t bend.
I think that mindfulness is a really important thing – the reader needs to know that they can trust the author to know what they’re doing. I’m still very much on the side of “get as much right as you possibly can without damaging the story”. It’s more than I’m trying to understand for myself what’s going on when people enjoy and recommend something like “Pirates”, which is (IMO) not even remotely convincing. Maybe they have a better imagination than me and need less convincing?
April 2, 2010 at 4:13 pm
I think I’d rather have more history, or at least more ACCURATE history, than less of it. The problem I have is that when I run across a detail that I’m not familiar, I immediately rush out and look up the bit of history so that I can find out more.
All too often, I find that the detail was just plain wrong. A made-up detail that’s plausible and fits the time is a delight; one that’s easily checked and easily disproved is a disappointment. If I could look it up, why didn’t the author?
Then, too, sometimes you run across concepts that are very romantic but that just wouldn’t have happened. I recall one medieval historical which featured a knight-nobleman who had met a Saracen woman while he was on Crusade (the First or Second, I believe) and took her as his mistress. Okay, fine. It could have happened. However, the book then went on to say that the knight and Saracen lady went on to get married…
…in front of a Protestant minister.
And the Saracen woman didn’t convert to Christianity.
I’m sorry, NO. The Protestant Reformation took place a long time AFTER the First and Second Crusades. There was no excuse for a Methodist minister to be in medieval England. Furthermore, the Saracen woman would have been considered a heathen and a worshiper of false gods; she would have had to convert. The concept of a mixed-faith marriage just didn’t exist.
It wasn’t the appalling errors that shocked me, though. It was the writers’ group that insisted that all of this was completely accurate. And how did they know it was accurate? Why, because they’d read other books set in the medieval period that had Protestant ministers and knights marrying Saracens. I can still remember the shock from some of them when I pointed out that Luther hadn’t been born yet, so, while heresies were possible, Protestantism wasn’t. And the shock turned to vituperative horror when I said that it would have been against Church policy to allow a Catholic and a Muslim to marry.
It had never occurred to any of them, including the author, that the “Saracens” fighting the Crusaders for control of Jerusalem had been Arabs and, by and large, followers of Islam.
The author was particularly furious, and couldn’t understand how I could suggest such a disgusting thing. I provided quotes from various articles, links to a number of websites…in vain. She loathed Muslims, which put her in a nasty position, as her two heroines were both Saracens who had, according to her book, followed their mother’s faith. (I’m not sure what she thought their mother’s faith WAS. Possibly Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.)
So while I am not a fan of writing about fat, pox-ridden men with bad teeth who just love a good hanging, I do worry about revisionist history creeping into stories. There was once a time when people read books assuming that authors had imaginations and made at least some of the story up. No longer. We are in an age when what is reported, in whatever medium, is presumed to be true, and the public is appallingly ignorant, unanalytical and incurious. Far too many people do take what is written in historicals as gospel, and it does not occur to them to question the most ludicrous assertions or to look up the gospel themselves.
This worries me. I’m afraid of NOT getting it right. I know I don’t know all the details of every single era, and I fret about saying something that will mislead someone.
I know what Junkfoodmonkey means, though about bending facts. Sharon Kay Penman does that on occasion. Like Cornwell, she takes liberties now and then, mostly for the sake of the reader’s understanding–moving this or that meeting, calling the king’s brother by his family name rather than by the name of his birthplace, using a name for a room that was not yet in use but which would be in years to come. Which I think is fair. She does tell you what she’s changed in the afterwords. As Junkfoodmonkey said, the reader knows she’s doing it mindfully, not just getting it wrong.
Penman said something once that I think that you and everyone else here will agree with. In the author’s note portion of Falls the Shadow, she says, “I still find myself torn between two faiths. The novelist’s need for an untrammeled free-flowing imagination is always at war with the historian’s pure passion for verity.”
I think I know exactly what she means.
April 2, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Yes, I very much agree with that. I think the exercise of writing historical fiction is an exercise of balancing the needs of the story with the need to not falsify history.
I’m really not sure how someone could write a book set in the Crusades and not think it mattered not to know that it was a war between Christians and Muslims (on the whole). Every time I try to grasp the “well, it doesn’t really matter, it’s only romance” opinion – as I’ve attempted to here, I keep coming up against these things that really do matter!
For my own part, I’m very much in favour of doing everything you can to get things right. I’m just trying to wrap my head around the other POV and figure out why it is that some people don’t care. It is entirely possible that I’m trying to defend the indefensible here though. I just don’t like having things that I don’t understand – I’d rather understand and disagree.
April 2, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I really do feel for you, having had to suffer through that ‘crusades story’ and explaining to the author why she was wrong
…but at the same time: THANK YOU. You’ve just given me the biggest laugh I’ve had all week – my husband thought there was something wrong with me, the way I was curled up over the laptop!
April 2, 2010 at 4:50 pm
I think Tracey has said it far better than I could. I think fiction is allowed some leeway in certain respects, especially in the romance department, but not with the historical details. Of course we don’t want to read the kerbillion boring aspects of someone getting dressed and washing and going to the loo and spending ten hours at work – and its the same with films there. These – like sex – should only appear when they further the plot. It might be vital that we follow the character to the loo – but if you do, I don’t want to have him sitting on an upstairs flush WC in 1800…
There’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t have a handsome pox free man – they did exist. You get it right, and you know you do – you give enough detail to produce an immersive fascinating experience but you make it so accessible that it is not a turn off to many. I know you love o’Brian, but I simply can’t get into him, because he is so good at what he does that I can’t cope with the detail, as much as I really enjoy the characterisation.
April 2, 2010 at 5:07 pm
For my own part, I love the detail – that’s part of why I like O’Brian so much, because I’m reading along for the ear-spoons and puddening and tompions and stuff. I almost don’t need a story with it – and in fact plot is O’Brian’s biggest weakness. He tends to just go for “stuff happens and then more stuff happens” rather than actual plot. But then I’m one of those readers who’s reading it for the history and wants to feel transported to an alien world (because the past is another world).
But after reading so many Age of Sail books where the author hasn’t particularly cared about the details, and seeing reviews from people who clearly really enjoyed them, I’m wondering what’s going on there. I don’t think they’re lying – they really did enjoy them. I just want to be able to fathom why.
April 2, 2010 at 7:29 pm
It’s one of those YMMV/horses for courses things, I suppose… I know if I read a Regency romance or a story set in a time period that doesn’t really interest me (i.e. anything post-1600), unless it’s a glaring error (e.g. in one memorable Regency romance a character was watching chipmunks scamper across an English lawn), I don’t worry about it too much. But if it’s a historical period I’m interested in, it bugs the heck out of me if something is wrong. Those stories where you can tell the author just watched Rome or The Mummy and that was their whole research–those are the ones that make me shriek. They make me want to issue errata slips.
Did any of your Regia Anglorum lot come up to York for the Jorvik Festival recently? There were stacks of re-enactors swarming through the city!
April 2, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Yes, horses for courses sounds about right
And certainly I am like you in being much less picky in general than I am when it comes to my areas of particular interest. Which is why I think that a lot of the time it’s enough just not to get egregious things wrong. The reader is willing to work with the author on the setting, and will probably provide a lot of the detail themselves, depending on their level of interest in the period. I guess the essential thing is that the writer should know more about the period than their reader – and that can only be assured by the writer putting the effort in to do their research.
Jorvik has been a regular feature on Regia’s calendar every year for the past 15 years that I’ve been a member. We weren’t there ourselves, unfortunately – it’s a bit too far to go for us these days.
April 4, 2010 at 3:21 am
It’s a pity your group won’t admit people of one gender passing as another IF that is their own personal identity–as it sounds like your daughter’s is–and IF the person stays in the opposite-sex character at all times. In fact, I wonder if you wouldn’t have a case under non-discrimination laws. Probably not worth bothering about, but still–it’s her identity.
Because people DID pass, and banning it is just another case of erasing transgender people, and that is wrong.
April 4, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Well, Ailith’s a funny case. While she does look like a boy, and she doesn’t at all mind if people mistake her for a boy, if I ask her if she wants to be a boy, she says no, she’s a girl. She’s just a girl who likes boy stuff. So I don’t know what the group’s attitude would be to someone who was actually transgender. I think that would be a different question. I would certainly fight harder for them than I did for Ailith, because although it’s a strong preference for Ailith, it’s not really part of her identity.
April 6, 2010 at 2:21 pm
How about a compromise? A writer doesn’t have to fill her/his story with lots of perfectly researched historical detail if she doesn’t want to, but what historical information does make it into the story should be accurate unless it’s clear that the story takes place in an alternative reality.
That way a writer who doesn’t want to spend months on research can still write their story, relying on the plot to keep the readers interested.
It seems to me to be very arrogant of a writer to plough through a historical story without knowing enough about the period to get basic facts straight.
I just learned today that ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ is a misquote: it originates in a poem by Alexander Pope from 1711, I think, where it reads ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’.
Bruin
April 6, 2010 at 8:33 pm
*g* Yes, I think your compromise is the middle ground that I was thinking of. I would certainly not be in favour of not caring at all and getting things wrong because you couldn’t be bothered to look anything up. Leaving stuff out if you don’t know it, or using generalities which are true as far as they go (even if there are occasional instances recorded of something else happening) can enable you to get your story out there without breaking the suspension of disbelief of your readers. And doesn’t require you to be steeped in historical detail.
For myself I prefer the detail, but I’d rather have convincing, believable generalities than the author making up any damn thing because they think they can.
April 6, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Okay, I lied. 1709.