From Schindler’s List to Pachinko, historical fiction has played an indispensable role in helping us step into the shoes, albeit briefly, of those who have come before us. Despite its self-professed falsity, the genre undoubtedly challenges and even rewrites how we interact with and remember the past. Its active role in shaping historical memory underpins demands for accountability and historical accuracy. Characters like Margaret Mitchell’s “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind have no doubt lent themselves to harmful and often untrue rhetorics. On the other hand, claiming to protect the past by otherwise immortalising it behind a glass only serves to render it incomprehensible and ultimately, forgettable. Of course, it must be handled with a great deal of care, but perhaps our preoccupation with the accuracy of historical fiction points toward another kind of care the genre requires: one that comes from its reader.
Historical Fiction’s unique grounding in historical reality not only humanises the nameless statistics on the pages of our textbooks, but also allows us glimpses of ourselves in the otherwise distant characters of History. Yet, the genre’s widespread influence has not gone without its critics. From perpetuating harmful stereotypes to ventriloquising the dead and appropriating their experiences, how can we
reconcile the need for reckoning with the past with the ethical thresholds of representability? If History is written by the victors, who gets to write historical fiction?
If we claim that a character could never have existed in historical reality, are we not also guilty of presupposing their conformity to some form of caricature? The continuum of truth on which History and Literature lie brings to mind the Sorites paradox – in a heap of fact and fiction, at what point does a text cease to be one and not the other? Who gets to decide? What exactly changes, when our suspension of disbelief in imaginary worlds is brought down to the very soil we stand on? In our justified desire to protect the past from misrepresentation, we can often forget that the beauty of fiction lies precisely in its capacity to wonder. To afford the self a myriad of different lives, to catch a glimpse of the infinite potentialities of the human soul.
So perhaps, it is not about what we demand of historical fiction, but about what it asks of us. That we look to it not for grand historical revisions or even evocative depictions of the past, but instead, to bear witness to the beauty of an ordinary and individual life amidst the extraordinary events of history.
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