Interesting piece in The Age about Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.

Novelist Kate Grenville has upset historians by claiming her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River is a new form of history writing.

…begins the report by Jane Sullivan. While researching the story, Grenville came across “dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney harbour.” The dispatch relates the story of Phillip’s encounter with an aboriginal man. Grenville explains how she could only hear Phillip’s voice. The voice of the aboriginal man was silent. There are many silent voices in history books, depending on who is writing them. Historians are always at work writing and rewriting the history books, trying to get the silent voices to speak. But should fiction writers try to do this? Grenville did not. She used the incident but changed it. She maintains that The Secret River is not a work of history, but fiction. Somewhere along the line, it is suggested, she may have been misquoted in the media. But she makes it clear that while history may have inspired the story, it is still very much fictional. From the story again:

“I don’t think The Secret River is history - it’s a work of fiction,” she writes from Canada where she is currently touring. “Like much fiction, it had its beginnings in the real world, but those beginnings have been adapted and altered to various degrees for the sake of the fiction.” Rather than simply say she had made everything up, she was trying “to acknowledge the complex relationship, backwards and forwards across an invisible line, between the world of fiction and the world of the real”.

But some historians got a bit pissed off. E.g. Dr Inga Clendinnen, a Melbourne historian:

She was incensed that Grenville had moved the episode geographically and in time. “The book’s shape is made completely different by that kind of casual transposition. It makes the novel not only not history but, in my admittedly very austere view, anti-history. “It’s a dramatic imagination unleashed on some wilfully selected historical material, used as grist to the novelist’s mill. I’ve nothing against novelists doing that. I just don’t want them to say they are taking things into some zone beyond history.”

Also Dr John Hirst (from Latrobe University) “rejects any fiction writer’s claim to write more penetrating history than historians,” and Dr Mark McKenna (from ANU) calls this sort of thing “fictive history.” I must admit that I have, over the years, felt that historians have let us down. You know, history at school - where were the women’s voices, the indigenous voices, the migrant voices? But I forgive all that now. I know that history is an ongoing unravelling. And that’s OK. But I understand that fiction does play off history - history is a part of who we are, part of our reality. But the historian’s work and the fiction writer’s work are two different things. In simple terms, I think the historian is motivated by the search for ‘truth’, but the fiction writer, when using historical detail, is searching for something else, maybe another sort of truth, but not the historian’s truth. Another quote from the article:

In a lecture a few years ago, novelist Margaret Atwood speculated on why it was that so many historical novels were being written in her home country, Canada. Among other reasons, she thought it might be because the culture was coming to an age when it was inclined to examine its history: “By taking a long hard look backwards, we place ourselves.”

The article in full here.

Note:

I had to delete and repost this and will now post comments made within the post itself, below:

7 Responses to Fiction and History

»» Comments

1. tom Comment by tom | 2006/10/21 at 03:32:09 |e

You can do anything in fiction. Anything. But to take real events and distort them is to disrespect the people involved, tell lies about them, in fact. Why not make up your own characters? Then you can do what you like with them. I think writers who use real people do it to give a spurious authenticity to their ideas. This is dishonest and, worst of all, it infiltrates bad history into the common consciousness, where it takes root.

2. kathryn Comment by kathryn | 2006/10/21 at 03:40:18 |e

Yes, that’s interesting. Telling lies. It’s funny, because is fiction is not fact, where fact is the truth, fiction is the lie, but at the same time another kind of truth. But to turn a fact into a fiction, yeah, that’s a lie. Hmm. Food for thought. Just to clarify the Grenville thing (in case I gave off wrong msg) — she didn’t use Gov. Phillip, but made up another character and changed timeframe and location.

3. tom Comment by tom | 2006/10/21 at 04:08:19 |e

Then I don’t see the problem, as long as the historical outline isn’t distorted. If you use real characters you’ve got to respect them, I think. You can imagine in the spaces between what’s known - after all that’s what historians do.

4. kathryn Comment by kathryn | 2006/10/23 at 02:23:18 |e

I understand what you mean about respect, but your comment has got me thinking. I mean, respect brings up ethics. Doesn’t it? The ethics of writing about real people’s lives as, a) a historian or b) a writer of fiction. A historian probably respects the “truth” instead of the historical figure, because in some cases it would be kinder (if kindness is also respect) to leave stuff out, to leave blank, to lie. A writer, some writers, tend to also use characters to present the story, maybe they respect the story? In terms of fiction, Iris Murdoch makes a good point about a novelist and the ethics of writing when she says (as I remember it, I can’t find the quote, it’s on another computer, I’ll try to get it later) that a great novelist is one who recognises the right of a character to act in his/her own way, as a person in his/her own right, authentically. I understood her to mean a good novelist is one who doesn’t manipulate the characters to tell her story, but allows the characters to be themselves. Anyway, I’ve gone off on a tangent and no longer addressing the initial thread.

5. Katrina Denza Comment by Katrina Denza | 2006/10/23 at 10:20:20 |e

Kathryn, I love your new site. Why haven’t I seen it before? It’s beautiful and professional!

6. kathryn Comment by kathryn | 2006/10/23 at 10:28:10 |e Thank you, Katrina!