What is historical fiction? Does it present a truthful interpretation of history or is it just pure escapism? In this article I shall attempt to answer this question with the aid of material by Paul Cobley , Michael Toolan and Laurence Perrine .
Historical fiction is a re-presentation of history through a selective account of what actually happened. You could argue that factual history is also a re-presentation of history because it partakes in the same selective rhetorical devices. The writer is presenting events that are appropriate to their readership. But the luxury of re-presentation also includes omission. Until the Windrush series in June 1998, it was commonly believed that there was no black presence in the British armed forces during the Second World War. Historians had previously chosen to overlook this. When history was re-presenting by the Windrush team, suddenly the UK realised that there was diversity in British history and that there has been a consistency and continuity of multi-culturalism for the past few centuries. This tends to suggest that selective omission can work as an anti-narrative.
Historical fiction is a technical manipulation of history. It presents a sequence of events from the perspective of the focaliser. The focaliser is usually the protagonist in the story, and is used as the lens through which these selective events are seen. This is what is known as Focalisation. Focalisation is a means of selecting and restricting narrative information from someone's point of view. Factual history is supposedly a detached, external, omniscient, objective version of events. But without evaluating and asserting the information that is available to you the account ends up being a bald version of history. Historical fiction is an artistic working of history through distribution of character presentation, events, disclosure and elaboration of story. It is a form of coming to terms with the past, in the present, through the act of interpretation. History then, just becomes an interpretation, and historical fiction is an embroidered version of it.
If historical fiction is one person's interpretation of history, would a 1st person narrative be more suitable than a 3rd person narrative? Although very limiting, a 1st person narrative enables you to get inside the tortured mind of a protagonist (Crime and Punishment, Marnie, Jane Eyre, etc). However, for a first time writer there is the danger of it becoming too autobiographical, which makes certain agents and publishers shy away. Unless you connect with the protagonist in the prologue, you are not going to stay with them for the rest of the story. Therefore, the 1st person narrative has to be someone whom the reader can identify with.
In conclusion then, historical fiction can be used as a metaphor for current events (in the same way that Science Fiction was used as a social commentary in Star Trek, and how Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth and Henry V as a metaphor for Elizabethan politics), or just as a vehicle to re-present history.
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