Fiction and Historical Fiction
From a storytelling perspective, the most interesting thing to me about Treme is that the show is a work of –albeit recent — historical fiction. And Treme is more than just fiction that takes place in the past, like say Michael Chabon’s Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. In the meticulous tradition of writers like Robert Graves and James Michener, Treme is fiction that seeks to recreate and broaden our understanding of the past. The characters are fictional people whose lives are affected by the movements of real people and real events.
That historical fiction aspect has also been my biggest problem with Treme. I have this creeping fear that David Simon and company are more interested in the history than the fiction; that they are sacrificing the literary, the deeply human, the entirely intangible truths for the sake of the factual truths. It can be a challenging reconciliation, but Simon proved with The Wire that he was capable of the balancing act. Why is it then that Treme continues to strike me as a parade of “Hey look how accurate we are!” type details?
Anyway, I bring that up to share this great quote from novelist Nathan Englander. Englander was asked by The New Yorker if when writing about devastating historical events (and I think Katrina and its aftermath qualifies), he feels “any burden of responsibility to the historical truth?”
As for responsibility toward historical truth, I feel a huge responsibility. I do massive amounts of research and feel a deep obligation toward accuracy. But it’s a controlled accuracy. We’re talking about fiction here, about creating new kinds of truth. I believe that anything that a story needs to be true is true by virtue of its necessity. If it’s not essential, then it may not be changed. But you need to have the facts to make those decisions. If a character jumps off a building, you need to understand gravity, and the limits of the human body, rate of falling, and all that, and then you can decide if you want him to fly. In this story, I can’t even tell you the number of things that I looked at or looked up, finally testing them on my devil’s-advocate friend Joel in Jerusalem, arguing the theoretical through. Then when it’s time for a big decision, I’m ready to stand behind it. So if a reader wants to write in and say, “There’s no way that an Egyptian soldier ever accidentally sat down with an Israeli soldier because they were wearing identical French-supplied uniforms,” I’d feel comfortable responding, “That may generally be true, but it definitely happened once—because it happened to Shimmy Gezer. It says so right there in paragraph two
As someone whose job occasionally involves the strange act of fact-checking fiction, I recognize both positions in this dilemma. The way I’ve always looked at the job is that it’s my task to point out any potential inaccuracies to the writer. If he/she believes a greater purpose – stylistic, thematic, just-becausic – is served by ignoring the fact that if a 16-year old attended middle school X in Y county, they would have probably attended this high school (a fact I recently pointed out), then so be it.
But, at the same time, it doesn’t do any good to unconsciously play fast and loose with the facts. Those who know better won’t trust a word you say. It’s a fine line to walk.
Also in the New Yorker recently, we have the possible fiction of several Eisenhower interviews:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/04/26/100426ta_talk_rayner
And a reader response forgiving Ambrose because “what truly matters is that Ambrose made the history of our country compelling”:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2010/05/17/100517mama_mail3