University of Adelaide Press
Chapter Title: Whose History? Historical Fiction and the Discipline of History in the
Classroom: Varying Views of the Past
Book Title: Whose History?
Book Subtitle: Engaging History Students through Historical Fiction
Book Author(s): Grant Rodwell
Published by: University of Adelaide Press. (2013)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.20851/j.ctt1t304sf.15
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part III
DECONSTRUCTING THE
HISTORICAL NOVEL
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10 Whose History? Historical Fiction and the
Discipline of History in the Classroom:
Varying Views of the Past
Alert students will often tell teachers and university lecturers that there is
sometimes a significant discrepancy between the same historical characters,
settings or incidents in historical fiction and nonfiction. An illustration of this
point arises with hugely successful author Bryce Courtenay’s work of historical
fiction, The Potato Factory (1995), and a subsequent work of nonfiction, which
sought to put the record straight on Isaac (Ikey) Solomon, one of the principal
characters in Courtenay’s novel. Judith Sackville-O’Donnell, a Melbourne
author, challenged Courtenay’s depiction of Ikey Solomon, who was also
believed to be the model for Charles Dickens’s fictional villain Fagin.
Sackville-O’Donnell’s The First Fagin: The True Story of Ikey Solomon
(2002) sold about 1500 copies. While a commendable publishing feat, this
fares very poorly in comparison with Courtenay’s The Potato Factory, whose
sales exceeded manyfold that of The First Fagin: ‘The Potato Factory was last
year [2003] listed by Angus & Robertson as 17th on Australia’s 100 favourite
books. Gold Logie-winner Lisa McCune was among the stars in a TV mini-
series based on the novel’ (Schwartz, 2004).
This is just one example of where a dedicated and motivated professional
historian can take issue with the historicity of a piece of historical fiction.
Clearly, if the sales of The Potato Factory are an index to the success of the
novel then the demonstrated warping of historical fact does little to offend the
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reading public. Do people prefer the ‘history’ they read in historical fiction?
Apparently many do. But can they trust it for its historical veracity?
Truth and deception in the writing of history
To begin, a short narrative of the changes in points of view. For example,
during the 1950s and 1960s British and American points of view in history
dominated the content in the school curriculum: for example, the causes
of the Second World War. For me, as a secondary school student in New
South Wales during the 1960s, a dominant and influential text was Winston
Churchill’s The Second World War (1953). In his six-volume history of the
conflict that appeared between 1948 and 1953, Churchill established the
accepted interpretation of the origins of the Second World War: that Hitler
launched a war of conquest. Rossi states that, ‘In 1950, Time magazine, then
at the height of its power and influence, named Winston Churchill “Man of
the Half Century”. His reputation was at a peak because of his leadership of
the Allied cause in World War II and his role in alerting the Free World to
the threat of Communism by his “Iron Curtain” speech in early 1946’ (Rossi,
2002).
But what did Time magazine write about Churchill sixty years later? In a
review article headed, ‘The ugly Briton: a scholarly account of Churchill’s role
in the Bengal Famine leaves his reputation in tatters’, Shashi Tharoor reviewed
Madhustree Mukerjee’s new book, Churchill’s Secret War (Time, 29 November
2010, p. 43.) The review article is an enlightening account of many things
to do with literature and history, not least, of the changing attitudes of Time
magazine to India.
Why the change? For one thing, the global balance of economic power
has moved decidedly in India’s favour during the past several decades. India’s
role as a prominent trading partner with the US, and that country’s emerging
economic power, is now significant. Tharoor writes that ‘Churchill said that
history would judge him kindly because he intended to write it himself ’. After
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all, Churchill coined the phrase, ‘history is written by the victors’. But Tharoor
(2010) is far less enthusiastic about Churchill’s multi-volume history of the
Second World War than were my History teachers back in the 1960s. She
writes: ‘the self-serving but elegant volumes he authoured … led to the Nobel
committee, unable in all conscience to bestow him an award for peace, to give
him, astonishingly, the Nobel prize for literature — an unwitting tribute to
the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill’s self-justifying embellishments’
(Tharoor, 2010).
Many people recognise the prestige and authority a Nobel Prize bestows,
notwithstanding the complex and contested effects and legacies of the Prizes
in a broader context. Tharoor goes on to argue that ‘few statesmen of the
20th century have reputations as outsize as Winston Churchill’s, and yet his
assiduously self-promoted image … rests primarily on his World War II
rhetoric, rather than his actions as the head of a government that ruled the
biggest empire the world has ever known’ (Tharoor, 2010).
Churchill wrote in his history of the Second World War: ‘no great portion
of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and
perils of the world war as were the people of Hinduism’ (quoted in Tharoor,
2010). In turn, Tharoor wrote that ‘few people during the immediate post-war
decades, reading this last paragraph would have doubted this being the truth.
We were continually told in schools and in the media the British Empire —
later the British Commonwealth — existed in order to improve the lives of the
people of the empire’. According to Tharoor,
British imperialism had long justified itself with the pretense that it was
conducted for the benefit of the governed. Churchill’s conduct in the
summer and fall of 1943 gave the lie to this myth’ … ‘I hate Indians,’ he
told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. ‘They are a beastly
people with a beastly religion. The [Bengal] Famine was their own fault’,
he declared at a war cabinet meeting, for ‘breeding like rabbits’.
Tharoor, goes on to suggest that ‘Churchill’s only response to a telegram
from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the [Bengali] famine
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was to ask why Ghandi hadn’t yet died’ (2010). Tharoor goes on to say that ‘in
1943, some 3 million brown-skinned subjects of the Raj died in the Bengal
famine, one of history’s worst’. As part of the war effort, Churchill ordered the
diversion of food from the starving Indians to already well-supplied British
soldiers, and to stockpiles in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including Greece
and Yugoslavia: ‘And he did so with a churlishness that cannot be excused on
grounds of policy’ (Tharoor, 2010).
Tharoor writes: ‘Some of India’s grain was also exported to Ceylon (now
Sri Lanka) to meet needs there, even though the island wasn’t experiencing
the same hardships’. Tharoor asked what did Churchill care about starving
Bengalis? ‘Australian wheat,’ he wrote, ‘sailed past Indian cities (where the
bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to depots in
the Mediterranean and Balkans; and offers of American and Canadian food
aid were turned down’ (Tharoor, 2010). Unimaginable today was the control
Britain had over the lives of everyday Indians: ‘India was not permitted to use
its own sterling reserves, or indeed, its own ships to import food’ (Tharoor,
2010). Tharoor (2010) makes a strong case against Churchill’s treatment of
this topic. It is almost as if his treatment belongs to the realms of historical
fiction.
MacMillan’s assessment offers corroboration to Tharoor’s slightly later
work, showing how Churchill created ‘a sweeping and magisterial account
which glossed over many awkward issues’ (MacMillan, 2009, p. 40). From
these accounts, it seems that Churchill’s history of the Second World War
may well suffer for want of ‘truth’, the very point which some critics have
condemned historical novels.
Indeed, the discrediting of Churchill’s work — his grand narrative —
supports Hayden White’s views about the writing of history. In reviewing
White’s Fiction of Narrative: essays on history, literature and theory 1957-2007
(2010), Inga Clendinnen writes:
For all its wistful aspirations, history was not, never had been and never
could be a science. It was an art, and its closest kin was poetry. …
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There is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not
found. And as to the notion of a true story, this is virtually a contradiction
in terms. All stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can
be true only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure
of speech can be true. (2011)
Clendinnen concludes — in words that resonate for the above discussion
about Churchill’s history of the Second World War — that:
White’s recognition of the covert seductions of narratives created to
sustain nation to the fantasies of special destiny shaping individual
biographies (and, alas, autobiographies) remains essential knowledge,
especially in view of the advice being given to younger historians by
older ones that if they want to challenge the market dominance of the
historical novelist, they had better get back to storytelling. (p. 28)
Most politicians are aware that histories are essential in nation-building.
‘History as fiction’
‘If the past is another country, historical novels are forged passports,’ wrote
Frank Campbell in The Australian in 2008. Campbell began his critical article
on historical fiction by pointing out the debate on the veracity of historical
fiction has been in the public discourse for at least a century. He writes
that the ‘perceptive American critic, Brander Matthews, said in 1897: “the
historical novel is aureoled with a pseudo-sanctity in that it purports to be
more instructive than a mere story. It claims ... it is teaching History”. But
it is not history: we cannot reproduce what has passed’ (Campbell, 2008).
Campbell added:
‘How can we know the past?... After all, psychology 101 suggests that
even simple events are reported inaccurately. Aren’t there as many
realities as witnesses? If present matters of fact are opaque, how can we
possibly re-create the culture of a Manchester police station of 1973, or
19th-century naval life, let alone the world of Claudius or Spartacus?
(Campbell, 2008)
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But we have uncertainty of the present, also, Campbell counters. Indeed,
‘How do we know we exist at all? … I might exist, but the evidence for
you is unconvincing. One more drink and we’ll all be phenomenological
postmodernists, whose grip on reality depends entirely on the next coffee’
(Campbell, 2008).
Campbell reiterates the argument that ‘historical fiction is said to tell
us more about the present than the past’. Historical novels are really scenarios
or dramas — Campbell refers to them as ‘lectures’ — about how the present
sees the past. He uses the example of Gone With The Wind (1936), and how
it stereotyped ‘the antebellum American south and still shapes perceptions’
(Campbell, 2008). But while the historical novel often has been dispatched to
the rubbish pile, for me it re-emerges, as is evident in the vigour and popularity
the genre enjoys today.
But how does this debate affect children’s appreciation of history? I
argue that History teachers should seek for our students to develop multiple
viewpoints, and to become critical readers of history. Groce and Groce (2005,
p. 101) show not only that children’s reading of historical novels enhances
their appreciation of novels generally, but also enhances development of the
values underpinning an understanding of history. The researchers suggest
students may benefit from understanding multiple viewpoints in history in
two ways: they may exhibit increased tolerance for others in contemporary
society as well as an increased ability to evaluate our own culture. For Groce
and Groce, historical fiction helps to achieve this because, as Nawrot (1996)
argues, it depicts life beyond the context of the student’s own lives and time.
Thus, with the enhancing of children’s understanding of historical
developments, their reading of historical fiction often requires teacher guidance.
And this is particularly so with historical fiction portrayed through film. As
far as the pedagogical use of film in the History curriculum is concerned,
most commentators will argue there usually are very different approaches (see
Marcus, ed., 2003). What of classics such as C.S Forester’s Hornblower series
(1938-67) or Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander (1970), or Robert
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Graves’s I Claudius (1934), all of which went on to become classics of cinema
and television? Erudite teachers have long used clips from the DVD versions
of these much-acclaimed productions to use as key components in their
teaching/learning strategies for their History lessons. So for Campbell, and for
me, all is not lost. At its best, historical fiction is ‘a delicate arrangement of lies
designed to spell truth. Historical fiction, the most elaborate embroidery of
all, can illumine the past rather than traduce it, but requires detachment from
the present as much as immersion in the past. Journeymen and propagandists
need not apply’ (Campbell, 2008).
A deficit model of historical writing?
But what motivates authors of historical fiction to write their work? There
exists the suggestion that some do so to ‘fill in the blanks’ left by authors of
nonfiction histories. For example, what motivated Tolstoy to write War and
Peace and structure it in the manner he did? The work is, in my view, one of
the most sublime creative literary efforts ever produced. There is every reason
to believe Tolstoy wrote from a deficit model of historical writing. In his Some
Words about War and Peace, published in 1868, he wrote that one motivation
in writing War and Peace came from common misinterpretations of the social
and cultural characteristics in Russia of the period covered by the novel (1805-
20):
If we have come to believe in the perversity and coarse violence of the
period, that is only because of the traditions, memoirs, stories, and
novels that have been handed to us, record for the most part exceptional
cases of violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant
characteristic of that period was turbulence, is as unjust as it would
be for a man, seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond a hill, to
conclude that there was nothing in the locality but trees. (Tolstoy, 1868,
trans. A. Mandelker, 2010, p. 1310)
Hence, Tolstoy structured his novel with narratives about war and peace,
through the fortunes of four Russian families. For readers of the novel, characters
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from the Bezúkhovs, the Rostóvs, the Bolkónskys and the Kurágins provide
some of the most memorable literary characters readers ever encountered.
Indeed, in the case of the search for historical truth, whatever that may
be, in some instances historical novelists have sought to improve upon extant
historical accounts. Mandelker shows that in the case of War and Peace, Aylmer
and Louise Maude, in their centenary edition of Tolstoy’s complete works
(Centenary Edition of Tolstoy’s Works, Oxford, 1928-37) write that ‘Tolstoy
consulted many other authorities and private letters, diaries, and memoirs of
the members of his own and other families that had engaged in the [1806
French/Russian and Austrian] war. These private sources sometimes enabled
him to correct mistakes he judged that the historians had made’ (cited in
Mandelker, 2010, p. 1325).
Often, the deficit motivation for writing historical novels continues into
the present-day. Speaking at a University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) seminar
on history and writing, academic Paula Hamilton discussed what she label the
‘deficit’ model of history writing. Here, she refers to historical novelists who
contend that they have turned to fiction because of a perceived ‘gap’ in the
historical record they feel driven to fill. Hamilton argues it is the apparent
limits of history that make writing possible; the role of the writer is to fill in
the blanks left unattended by the writers of nonfiction histories (Hamilton,
2003). Nelson states that ‘in practice, the “deficit” argument takes various
forms in which the writer supplies the interiority or atmosphere deemed to
be missing from history, or manufactures actual historical events that lack the
necessary proofs to count as history’ (Nelson 2007).
Writers of nonfictional history, and some serious professional historians,
may rail at this approach to their craft. As Nelson contends, ‘One of the central
problems with the “deficit” argument is that it speaks to a very naturalised
theory of history, in which historians labour altruistically in archives to unearth
relics of the past, which are converted into an historical record conceived as
truth’ (Nelson, 2007). Indeed, ‘in this sense, it is merely the writer’s job to
extend the edifice, to make it more “perfect”, more “complete” — without
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“gaps”’(Nelson, 2007). In short, this model entails fictionalising the unknown
detail in the archival sources, as developed in the narrative: for example, types
of clothes being worn by various characters.
Inga Clendinnen is one such historian who declares this model to be
anathema to the craft of the serious historian. While she admits the need to
be close and personal with her readers in her narrative, the larger ‘difference
between History and Fiction is the moral relationships each establishes between
writer and subjects, and writer and reader’. The historian of nonfiction has a
moral obligation to be strictly ‘nonfictional’ (Clendinnen, 1996). For Nelson,
the fictionalising of the detail should not be an issue with the historical
novelist: ‘the factual events of the story could be altered and improved, but
the period details had to be as realistic as possible’ (Hamilton, 2003, cited in
Nelson, 2007).
‘Mining’ and ‘pillaging’ historical knowledge
Kate Grenville once quipped that ‘as a [historical] novelist, my relationship
to history has always been pretty much the same relationship the Goths
had to Rome. History for a greedy novelist like me is just one more place to
pillage’ (Grenville, 2005). She is not suggesting there is a recklessness about
her historical research, or a general disregard for convention. Do the spoils of
that ‘pillage’ — the historical knowledge gained from reading her historical
novels — offer any general worth? Or to put it another way, how much can the
knowledge gained from historical novels be of value to the general populace,
or indeed, a History curriculum?
Grenville — far from endorsing recklessness — confessed to an abiding
regard for historical truth: ‘When Jill Roe said of history “Getting it right means
you can’t make it up”, it was a reminder to novelists like me that, although we
might use history, we also have to respect it’. Indeed, ‘it’s all very well to play
fast and loose with historical truths, but there comes a point when we have to
get it right, or try at least’ (Grenville, 2005). Here Grenville is addressing an
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important issue in the writing of history, an issue historiographers for decades
have been addressing. The historical novelist need not be ‘playing’ with history
any more than does the professional historian, notwithstanding the novelist’s
obligation to storytelling.
Generally, historians take their craft very seriously. They even have gone
to ‘war’ over substantial issues in what they perceive to be appropriate recording
and interpretation of history. Many students will be aware of the term ‘history
wars’. The term was coined in the United States in 1994 to describe the
argument between those who favoured a triumphalist account of American
achievement and those urging a more muted and critical stance. Australia
had its own ‘history wars’ beginning sometime around 2000 (Windschuttle,
2002). In considerable part, this had to do with debates over so-called ‘three
cheers’ versus ‘black armband versions of history. Part of the debate involved
the relative veracity of historical nonfiction and historical fiction.What could
historical fiction add to the debate?
When Grenville claimed The Secret River (2005) would rise above the
parochial squabbles of the then raging history wars by getting ‘inside the
experience’ of the past, she provoked a strong response from some academic
and professional historians. For Collins (2008), ‘this ire was particularly
surprising in the case of Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen, two leading
historians noted for the eloquent reflective, literary quality of their respective
books on the intimacy between Indigenous and settler Australians’ (Collins,
2008).
Clendinnen (2003) and McKenna (2002) strongly questioned Grenville’s
views on the role of her historical novel with regards to her claims to historical
truth over that of their own profession. Indeed, it is this very jousting over the
province of historians and historical novelists to historical truth that has led
Gay Lynch to assert ‘historians would be better placed to study King Canute
than attempt to prevent fiction writers working in their field’ (Lynch, 2007,
p. 2).
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Nevertheless, serious professional historians do feel aggrieved about the
various raiding parties of historical novelists into their perceived traditional
territory. Clendinnen claimed ‘novelists have been doing their best to bump
historians off the track’ (Clendinnen, 2006, p. 23, cited in Lynch, 2007,
p. 2). She contended that she was on the lookout for historical fiction
writers who show attitude (‘exuberant confidence’, ‘insouciant exploitation
of fragments of the past’), ‘lack historical professionalism (the collapsing of
time, opportunistic transpositions, and elisions) and show off their subjective
petticoats’ (Clendinnen, p. 23, cited in Lynch, 2007, p. 2).
All of this public literary jousting prompts Lynch to ask whether ‘the
battered protagonists in the history wars tried to throw off the cheerful
trailing historical fiction writers doing business in their own way?’ (2007, p.
3). Lynch notes what was said at the close of a 2007 Sydney Writers’ Festival
panel (‘Making a Fiction of History’). Here, according to Lynch (2007, p.
4), Clendinnen conceded some ‘fictional truths’. For Lynch, Clendinnen’s
‘consistent message might be: stay behind your lines and you won’t get hurt’
(p. 4).
However, clearly Grenville’s Secret River has invited comments about
the relationship between history, literature, and public ethics in contemporary
Australia. While it attracted praise and criticism for its representation of early
Australian frontier history, McKenna has decried the positive reviews of the
book as symptomatic of ‘[a] cultural space [that] has opened up into which
writers of fiction are now more commonly seen as the most trustworthy
purveyors of the past’ (Lynch, 2007, p. 5). Similarly, John Hirst considered
the book was an expression of a misguided and ill-informed contemporary
liberal imagination (Hirst, 2007, p. 36).
In my view, the developing public stoush seemed to be as much about
professional territory as anything else. Had writers of historical fiction any
right to trespass onto the domain of historians? In reviewing Grenville’s next
novel, The Lieutenant, Stella Clarke reminded readers of what McKenna had
said about Grenville ‘of getting above herself, of thinking she was doing history
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better than the professionals’. As Clarke wrote, ‘it was fine for novelists and
historians to jog along on their separate tracks, on either side of the ravine (this
is tough terrain) that separates truth from untruth, but Clendinnen thought
Grenville had somehow moved over and tried to ‘bump historians off the
track’ (Clarke, 2008).
Clarke continued: ‘Undaunted, Grenville struck back … with a strong
defence of her approach, saying she really did not think of The Secret River as
history’ (Clarke, 2008). Grenville may have been more interested in perfecting
her craft as a historical novelist than competing with historians. In Clarke’s
words, ‘with historians pushing to cleave publicly to unmodish virtues of
precision, her more contemporary emphasis on nuance threatened to push
them beyond credibility’ (Clarke, 2008). According to critic and novelist Jane
Sullivan (writing at that time in The Age), Clendinnen remained implacable,
even after the publication of Grenville’s persuasive explanatory account of her
approach, Searching for the Secret River (2006) (Clarke, 2008).
Some historical novelists seemed to have watched closely the Grenville
versus historians spat. For example, Richard Flanagan seems to have been
careful not to have ventured into this imbroglio when talking about his novel,
Wanting (2008). Don Anderson comments: ‘Keeping in mind, however, the
great Kate Grenville v. Inga Clendinnen bout regarding rival claims of history
and poetry in The Secret River, Flanagan is understandably cautious in denying
history to be his “true subject”’ (Anderson, D., 2008). Anderson concluded:
‘Though surely Aristotle said something in his Poetics about poetry being
superior to history?’ (2008).
But the public debate of historical fiction versus history continued to
grow during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and Grenville’s novels
were at the centre of the public debate. For example, Clarke (2011) writes,
‘in recent years, a forest of journalistic and academic work has rehearsed and
extended the original spat’ (p. 19). Other Australian researchers, however, see
the relationship between history and historical fiction in more conciliatory
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terms. Sutherland and Gibbons conclude that ‘Historical fiction and history
reflect a symbiotic rather than a parasitic relationship. Each gives to the other,
from their respective strengths’ (Sutherland & Gibbons, 2009). They continue:
Even so the common elements between literature and history, especially
through the use of narrative, the recreation of an historical era and the
attempts to establish a link between the past and the present remain.
… Inevitably there are differences between the work of historians and
writers of historical fiction, but these differences may be thought of …
in terms of family resemblances. Bearing this analogy in mind historical
fiction should never be thought of as the poor relation. Historical fiction
can take its place at the family table in equal company with History.
(Sutherland & Gibbons, 2009)
Sutherland and Gibbons also insist it is ‘appropriate to also acknowledge the
significance of the reader’ (2009). The authors refer to Bird (2009), who depicts
a reader of historical fiction as being ‘in a position of privilege, [who] to a
degree becomes a player in the history’ (Bird, 2009, p. 20, cited in Sutherland
& Gibbons, 2009).
In reviewing Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009), Bird added: ‘Historical
fiction does what all fiction does: creates a world in which characters live and
die’ (Bird, 2009, p. 20). Moreover, ‘But the historical novelist takes over your
musings and engages your senses, setting the scene, painting the landscape,
animating the bodies, minds and souls of the characters’ (p. 20). Thus, in
highlighting the effects produced by the writer’s craft — effects that allow
the reader to identify more completely with the experiences and emotions of
the historical characters and their world — Bird is in fact drawing attention
to how historical fiction might enhance teaching and learning in the History
curriculum.
Clarke (2011) looked to the publication of Kate Mitchell’s Australia’s
‘Other’ History Wars: Trauma and the Work of Cultural Memory in Kate
Grenville’s The Secret River (2010) as being evidence of this growing interest
in the historical fiction and history debate. Moreover, for Clarke, The Secret
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River, ‘with associated commentary, turned up on educational curriculums. In
the history v fiction debate, Grenville is totemic’ (p. 19).
In her acknowledgments for Sarah Thornhill (2011), Grenville notes
history has become a dangerous word for her to utter. She emphatically
states that Sarah Thornhill is is a novel — fiction — not history. ‘Yet’, Clarke
asks, ‘is it that simple?’ (2011, p. 19). Clarke continues: ‘this novel revisits
the fascinating, troubling territory of the history wars. It rows out on to the
secret river of contemporary Australian anxiety [concerning Indigenous/non-
Indigenous relationships] … and navigates a fictional tributary’ (p. 19).
Clarke reminds readers that ‘Grenville’s three novels have been deluged
by commentary on her treatment of the Australian past, over and above
discussion of their [relative literary] merits’. So, why continue to inflame the
debate? ‘Why go back, then, to the ambitious ruthless emancipist, William
Thornhill, and the horns of his prickly dilemma? Why not just cut the history
out of the fiction?’ (Clarke, 2011, p. 19). For Clarke, ‘Grenville’s range
extends well beyond historical fiction, as in [her] … Orange award-winning
The Idea of Perfection (1999)’ (Clarke, 2011, p. 19). Clarke (2011) considers
that Grenville ‘is, apparently, driven by the same compulsion that gnaws at
other commanding writers, such as Flanagan, Pulitzer prize-winner Geraldine
Brooks, and recent Miles Franklin winner, Kim Scott (That Deadman Dance,
2011)’. (p. 19).
Clarke contends that for these notable contemporary authors of Australian
historical fiction, their chosen genre ‘is not just about dramatising the past but
about tackling a contemporary “culture of forgetting”, acknowledging history’s
“secret river of blood” (terms used in Australia’s ‘Other’ History Wars)’ (2011, p.
19). Moreover, ‘it is histories that are Grenville’s concern. Sarah’s [Grenville’s
principal character in Sarah Thornhill] story shows how unknown individual
stories fill the past and create the present’ (p. 19). Indeed, the present mostly
is not far from the historical novelists’ fundamental drive: ‘Stricken, Sarah
appalled by knowledge of her father’s inhumanity, believes “there is no cure
for the bite of the past”. However, the act of storytelling offers hope for a
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fuller understanding [of the present]’ (Clarke, 2011, p. 19). Indeed, ‘Scott,
in response to his Miles Franklin win, said: “There is a lot of reconciling —
particularly reconciling ourselves to a shared history — that is yet to happen”’
(p. 19). For Clarke ‘Grenville’s vivid fiction performs as testimony, memory
and mourning, within this collective, postcolonial narrative’ (2011, p. 19).
Superior to history? But whose history?
With all this stoushing between writers of historical fiction and professional
historians, exactly what type of historical knowledge is at stake here? How
does the knowledge gained from reading historical novels fit with the kind of
knowledge then Australian Prime Minister John Howard yearned for on the
eve of Australia Day 2006 when addressing the National Press Club? Howard
said:
Too often, [history] is taught without any sense of structured narrative,
replaced by a fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’. And too often,
history, along with other subjects in the humanities, has succumbed
to a postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of
achievement is questioned and repudiated. (Howard, 2006)
Here Howard desires a history that advances a kind of eulogy of Australia’s
past, one in which there is a steady advancement of the nation, highlighting
the triumph of progress. This is often labelled evolutionary idealism.
This was a message which he sustained through to September 2012
(when he was no longer Prime Minister). When delivering the Sir Paul Hasluck
memorial lecture in Perth, he ‘slammed’ (as Elks and Packham described it)
the proposed new ACARA Senior History Curriculum as being ‘unbalanced’
and ‘bizarre’ (Elks & Packham, 2012). In an editorial, The Weekend Australian
responded by declaring,
compared with the hodgepodge of social justice, feminist, ecological
and peace studies foisted on students of history and its feeble cousin
SOSE ... in recent decades, the new national curriculum is a significant
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step forward for teachers and students. Provided it is well-taught — and
this will be a challenge because well-qualified history teachers are in
short supply — students should gain a broad overview and some in-
depth knowledge of the events, political movements and individuals
who shaped the ancient and modern worlds, including Australia. ...
Mr Howard also raised important questions about the lack of focus on
Australian federation, lack of balance in the draft senior ‘workers’ rights’
unit and the omission of liberalism and conservatism, egalitarianism,
Darwinism, imperialism and Chartism as key ideas of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. (The Weekend Australian, 2012)
To be fair to John Howard and The Weekend Australian, adopting an
evolutionary idealist approach does not necessarily mean excluding those vital
elements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century history from a
History curriculum. It is all a matter of balance, as John Howard and The
Weekend Australian suggest, and the triumph of one over another should not,
I suggest, be labelled progress.
Curthoys and Docker (2006) draw attention to the work done by
Butterfield (1931) in raising criticism of evolutionary idealism, or a Whig
interpretation of history: ‘history should not be written as a story of progress.
Butterfield not only argued against triumphalist tendencies in historical
writing, but also raised doubts about the possibility of objective history itself ’
(Curthoys & Docker, 2006, p. 98).
But how does this triumphalist-cum-evolutionary-idealist view of
history translate to authors of historical fiction? The very sort of sentiment
Howard made in such an influential national forum regarding Australian’s
understanding of our nation’s past has also captured the attention of writers
such as Louise Wakeling, who, in regard to the writing of historical fiction,
has stated:
New Historicists, in particular, have questioned the kind of totalising,
transcendent and coherent narratives which have given meaning to (or
rather imposed meaning on) past events, and hence their arguments are
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of considerable relevance to any writer who aims to recreate some aspect
of the past in fictional mode, as in the historical novel. The question at
issue here, for the writer of fiction, as for the historiographer, is not so
much the truth or falsity of one view of history or another, but rather
‘Whose history is it anyway?’ (Wakeling, 1998, pp. 16-17)
It is the very question of evolutionary idealists’ interpretation of history —
historiography — that has motivated Wakeling to look to Hayden White
(H. White, 1982, pp. 17-18, as cited in Wakeling, p. 17). More than most
scholars in postcolonial history, White has been influential in persuading
writers of history, in both fictional and nonfictional forms, to question their
values in interpreting history. First, writers need to recognise history is chaos.
According to White, ‘the chaos of phenomena in the past that constitutes the
most meaning of “history” is, in its very ordering and setting down, made
meaningful within the particular non-contradictory, unitary world-view or
ideology’ of the evolutionary idealist. For Wakeling, reflecting on White’s
work, ‘this is true for both factual and fictional history. Historical discourses
derive their form from whatever moral, political, social or aesthetic values have
in society, and sometimes in opposition to them’. There can be no agnostic,
innocent view of historical interpretation — all writers of history are bound in
an ideology of one form or other: ‘there can be no “history” without ideology’
(Wakeling, 1998, p. 18).
Providing insights into the work of the writer of historical fiction
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Australian historical fiction was
being marketed in styles never before imagined. First, Australia’s best-selling
author of historical fiction, Bryce Courtenay, chose to add a ‘Note on Sources’
to his published work, The Potato Factory, and to confirm that he had consulted
‘the wonderful resources of the State Libraries of Victoria and New South
Wales, and also of those of the Australian War Memorial’ (Courtenay, 1999,
pp. 657-59). For the public-at-large, the presence of such a bibliographical
note may serve to legitimise the historicity of his work.
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Other Australian historical novelists, however, have gone further. The
year following the publication of her The Secret River, Grenville published
Searching for the Secret River (2006), which was in fact based on her exegesis for
her doctorate in Creative Arts at UTS. The publication of this work, in a sense
acting as a preface to Grenville’s original novel, provoked Gay Lynch’s (2007)
research extensively cited already in this book. Moreover, the very popularity
of the two works suggested to Lynch there was an emerging genre at hand,
one in which there is a published background to a historical novel, much in
the same manner as DVD producers produce a Director’s Cut to background
material to a popular DVD. Only the success of future publications will tell
if exegetical works continue to gain public interest. They may well serve an
important function in the classroom.
In the classroom: changing interpretations of history, and the changing
nature of historical fiction
Historical writings in their various guises have undergone massive changes in
the past several decades. A wonderful new realism is now expressed in the pages
of written history, not the least historical novels written for younger readers.
Groce and Groce (2005, p. 110) refer to the work of Jacobs and Tunnell
(2004), who write of this new realism in children’s literature as bringing ‘a
great depth of honesty for younger readers’.
Groce and Groce (2005, p. 110) go on to write, quoting MacLeod,
who comments further on this topic: ‘Children’s literature, historical as well
as contemporary, has been politicized over the past thirty years; new social
sensibilities have changed the way Americans view the past’ (1998, p. 27).
Given these new paradigms in children’s historical fiction, what are some
essential criteria for evaluating historical novels written for younger readers? In
attempting to answer this question, Groce and Groce (2005) look to Donelson
and Nilsen (1997), who argue a good historical novel features ‘an authentic
rendition of time, place and people being featured’ (p. 190, as cited in Groce
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& Groce, 2005, p. 110). Moreover, historical fiction should write history as it
was, and ‘no attempt should be made to shelter the reader from the realities of
the time period’ (Hancock, 2004, p. 147, as cited in Groce & Groce, 2005,
p. 110). Most emphatically, ‘history should not be sugarcoated’ (Jacobs and
Tunnell, 2004, p. 119, as cited in Groce & Groce, 2005, p. 110). This has not
always been so — and historical novels such as Ernestine Hill’s My Love Must
Wait (1948) come to mind. Hill’s novel glorified the life of Matthew Flinders,
particularly his six-year detention in Mauritius during the Napoleonic Wars.
Changes in historical fiction and implications for school History teaching
How has historical fiction changed over the years, and how does this affect
pedagogical and curriculum decisions made by teachers? This question
has a direct impact on what decisions teacher educators make for their
undergraduates in respect to content. It is not surprising to learn the changes
in the interpretation and writing of history are mirrored in the changes in
historical fiction written for young readers.
The revisionist women’s history movement dating from the 1970s is
one example of how broader historical interpretation has been reflected in
historical fiction written for younger readers. Groce and Groce (2005, p. 109)
refer readers to how Hickman (2001) approaches this reality with younger
readers. She often searches for a balanced point of view in the novels she asks
her students to read: ‘when I am reading in my critical-theory mode, I might
look for a character who is not only true to the record but who embodies
qualities that would be useful against injustices of our time as well as her own’
(p. 97, cited in Groce & Groce, 2005, p. 109).
Groce and Groce (2005) make one other very important point about
the criteria for choosing suitable historical novels for the classroom. They insist
that ‘readers of historical fiction should be aware of overgeneralizations such
as grouping all Native Americans into a homogeneous group with similar
characteristics and cultures’ (p. 110). This is in accord with Galda and Cullinan,
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who observe ‘noteworthy historical novels do not overgeneralize; they do not
lead the reader to believe, for example, that all Native Americans are like those
portrayed in any one story. Each character is unique, just as each of us is, and
while the novelist focuses on one person in a group, it should be clear that the
character is only a person, and not a stereotype’ (Galda & Cullinan, 2002, p.
208, as cited in Groce & Groce, 2005, p. 110, emphasis in original).
* * *
In considering this debate between the relative historical truths contained in
historical fiction and nonfiction, it is, I suggest, an error to think that the facts
of the nonfiction are any more complete than those contained in historical
fiction. Churchill’s History of the Second World War is an example of histories
that can be written to suit the political agendas of people and, indeed, nations.
But, as was the case here, readers can only trust that revisionists will eventually
recast the historical record with some credence to all voices contained in the
history. But not all commentators agree on the relative historical insights
provided by historical fiction. For example, Campbell (2008) laments the
weight given to historical novels in their contested historical veracity. Some
might consider it is simply wrong that Bryce Courtenay’s work of historical
fiction on the life of Ikey Solomon far outsells serious nonfiction on the same
topic, such as Sackville-O’Donnell’s The First Fagin.
Some commentators might allege historical novels are written to fill
in the gaps left by historical nonfiction. This is a deficit model of historical
writing, and brings into focus the purpose for which historical fiction is
written. Most authors of historical fiction, for example Grenville, would argue
that they write novels not to compete with historians but do so for the sake of
their chosen art form. While they may ‘pillage’ historical facts, they do so for
a different purpose than do historians.
Another problem facing those who argue for the greater veracity of
nonfiction histories over historical fiction, comes with the question of exactly
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whose histories are being referred to. There are those who contend evolutionary
idealist, whiggish histories, as eulogised by former Prime Minister John
Howard in his address to the National Press Club on the eve of Australia Day
2006, affords a tragic example of how nonfiction history can serve political
agenda, while masquerading as objective histories.
The writing of children’s historical fiction during recent years has reflected
these same developments. Increasingly, this genre now encompasses an open
honesty, pulling few punches. Rather than avoiding sugarcoated treatment of
difficult topics that authors might once have avoided, issues such as gender,
race and so on, are now written about openly and portrayed transparently.
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