"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!"
--John Proctor, The Crucible
~~
When I started to comment on Vicky's Versionings post, it soon became apparent that I had enough material for a post of my own. Plus, I disagreed, which is nearly always more fun and interesting than agreeing. Thus, in a quest to further the multi-voiced ends of our lovely Eve's Alexandria, then (and to procrastinate over writing about demonomania and misogyny in Huysman's The Damned), here be a few dissenting thoughts.
First, a little background. Yes, I'm a historian (or even an historian, depending on your views on 'h'-dropping) by trade and inclination. What does this mean? While it undoubtedly requires knowing large amounts of fascinating but objectively quite useless facts, to me the primary interest to be derived - and lesson to be learned - from a study of history is much the same as that which I seek in fiction: empathy, different perspectives. A constant awareness of the multiplicity of voices and viewpoints, and how they affect the picture that is implied and inferred. Indeed, my D.Phil. research centres on historiography rather than names-and-dates chronography. (I'm interested in how the history of the Muslim conquest of Spain was written, anything from 50 to 900 years after the event; how it was filtered and shaped by the priorities and expectations of later writers and their audiences).
Yet even chronography is not, for me, about finding the sole truth of What Actually Happened - although I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is no such thing (for simple events: either I was born on a given date of the official calendar of my birth country, or I was not; faulty record-keeping or changes in perceptions of time cannot alter that, they can only obfuscate it). It is about degrees of likelihood, based on a critical analysis of the best available information.
Of course, connecting with the conceptual and perceptual world of the past is immensely difficult; this is all subject to bias and agenda - covert or overt, conscious or unconscious. Yet professional historians are held to different standards - by both their peers and by the wider public - than they were in, say, 10th-century Cordoba or 1st-century Rome; there is an expectation of objectivity and of evidential backing that goes beyond "my teacher told me this". Truth, or its approximation, is valued over entertainment or edification. Our society's notions of the boundaries of individuality have also changed: we consider ourselves the only rightful makers and presenters of our identity, and that this right is something that can be protected and enforced. Those around may only ever see facets of us, but these facets, we feel, are not the whole, and claims to the contrary are misrepresentation. Just because we are selective about how we show ourselves to others, do others have the right to, in turn, show us selectively?
There has always been much fiction and fictionalising in the writing of history; but the emphasis is, now, upon striving towards accuracy. Not so when history is co-opted for fiction. Now, I enjoy (intelligent) historical fiction and historical films a great deal, even if sometimes it means switching off the brain; I might groan at serious anachronisms, but no more than I do at awful dialogue or wooden acting or Orlando Bloom teaching the locals how to irrigate their own land in an afternoon in Kingdom of Heaven. History is fair game, to my mind, if approached with a modicum of care and style.
Historical people are not.
I suppose what I've been trying to say in the course of all the above wittering is that my objections to the fictionalising of real people do not - I believe - stem from pedantry. That said, the first is, admittedly, quite pedantic: a historical period is much more flexible and forgiving of inaccuracy or outright fantasy than an individual life. Circumstances and events can be spun out and explained in a myriad different ways, many equally valid; a person's actions might be interpreted in varying ways, but to create new actions (and, worse, thoughts and motivations) for them is to transform that person. My gut feeling is that it is, if not immoral, then certainly disrespectful to deliberately make things up about a person who once lived - no less so than about someone currently alive. When does a person's life become public domain? When they have been dead for 20 years? 100? When we don't know much about them anyway? Should privacy and protection against misrepresentation (or "re-imagining") only apply to those able or willing to defend themselves? If this is so, what does that make of the integrity of an individual personality? Is identity and its attendants really time-limited? And could I indulge in any more rhetoricals?
I agree that the line between fiction and non-fiction is a blurry one, but I feel that the line/zone lies in a different place than some do: I think fiction carries a greater burden of expected accuracy than some its practitioners and readers are willing to concede. While the character in The Hours may indeed be just a 'version' of Virginia Woolf, the very fact that she bears that name creates an inescapable link between the actual Woolf and the fictional one - and an expectation in the mind of the average reader or viewer that the character will be in some way a representation, as opposed to a creation or an interpretation. In other words, that even if she is being made to say and do things she never did, these words and deeds are an extrapolation of what is known about the real individual. While I take the point that I probably ought to give said Average Viewer more credit when it comes to distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction, there can surely be no doubt that visual fictionalisations can be quite indelible, even if not always consciously; how often have you seen an adaptation of a book or a play, and forever afterwards heard the actor's voice in your head when you return to the original? (And, really, how many people do actively go out and seek alternative views, besides we few, we hopelessly geeky few? ;-))
My discomfort (or impatience) with this goes beyond distortion or 'lying', however; and herein lies my second objection. If the fictional character really is only a 'version', a fictive creation who happens to share some of the circumstances or themes of the person... why bother? What is the value of writing a story with someone called Virginia Woolf in it, if the character is only ever intended to be Woolf-esque? Why not write a purely-invented person - one who is inspired by Woolf (or her work) but, lacking the association of her name, makes no claims to be her?
Here I'll roll out once again my favourite (extreme) example of the pointlessness of this: from the afterword to Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire, a work of historical fiction very loosely based on British dealings with Afghanistan in the mid-eighteenth century:
My characters are often rather unlike, and sometimes, as in the case of Masson, very unlike their originals. (In reality a Londoner, an accomplished artist, he certainly never committed murder or sodomy in his life, and he, and his descendants, deserve my apologies).
This left me shaking my head (and, as was pointed out to me around the time I first read the book, the very fact that Hensher feels the need to apologise for this suggests he's aware of the questionable nature of it). What, precisely, is the point of using a real person as a shell for your creation? If you're going to invent everything else, why not fictionalise the name, too? How does the name benefit the work, just because it belonged to someone (utterly unlike your character) who happened to live at the time?
I can't help but feel that this is both a failure of imagination and another facet of our present-day cult of celebrity. Our society's appetite for information - whether real or shamelessly fabricated - about people in the limelight appears limitless. Having a career that brings one into the public eye seems to burn away any right to privacy, as if whoever our favourite actor (or whoever) is sleeping with makes a difference to their performance onscreen. Increasingly, this is something that persists long after that career is over, except that it somehow transitions from tabloid gossip to Oscar-winning biopic, and much the same impulses underlie both things. Furthermore, creative use of a real (dead) person, whether on the page or on the screen, is perceived to add weight to an endeavour (likewise, that old chestnut, "based on a true story"). The Hours was a beautiful, clever, innovative (if occasionally whiny...) film that nevertheless attracted much of its attention and pseudy cachet because one of its leads was impersonating someone (semi) famous (oh, and the nose).
Likewise, historical fiction like Hensher's adorns itself with a veneer of 'real' people for a fake sense of verisimilitude and significance, as if somehow a story in which the characters were admitted to be invented might not be sufficiently literary. Ultimately, real names sound more impressive than invented ones (just as realism is generally championed over fantasy, but that's a whole different bugbear...). Fiction does not have the same duties of accuracy and truth as non-fiction, absolutely not - but it seems to me that fictionalising of this nature is trying to have one's cake and eat it. It seeks the appearance and 'weightiness' of reality, while reserving the right to utterly ignore the substance of it - almost as if it lacks the conviction of its own fictionality, and feels it should be hidden beneath a more respectable facade.
I had another point, but I've (mercifully) forgotten it, and have already hogged the family internet connection for too long. I think what I'm trying to say is that history is, in fiction, malleable: a backdrop and a genre and a source of themes. But historical people are individuals; dead, sure, collections of traits and contradictions and (self)-(mis)representations, but nevertheless with a cohesion and an integrity, ill-served by distortion for distortion's sake by anyone but themselves.
Or something. Hopefully all this is provocative enough for a bit of further debate. There is more on this topic (more clearly-thought out and better-phrased, too...), in a piece by Guy Gavriel Kay over at Bright Weavings.
~~Nic