Historiography versus Historical Fiction – “True Stories and the Facts in Fiction”

For Penelope Lively and, of course, for the novel’s main protagonist, Moon Tiger also serves as a means to discuss the rivalry and/or alliance between historiography and fiction. Claudia Hampton ponders extensively on the relationship between historical fiction and precise scholarship and asks herself how much truth there is in both.

Written down in the “cool level tone of dispassionate narration” (MT, 8), historiography is generally a simple “account of which general comes out of it the best, who had how many tanks, who advanced where at which point and why” (MT, 70) but does not tell what actually happened to the people behind these numbers and statistics. The feelings and emotions³¹ of those who participated in historical events are regarded unimportant and are thus absent from historiography. Historiography demands objectivity and has to stick to the “essentials” (MT, 78) of history so that the private sphere of life has to be left out.

History has indeed often been written about from a great distance, turning it into something

“quaint” and something “the historian can write objectively about” (Moran 1993, 121). And Mary H. Moran continues explaining that “in Claudia’s day the academy’s approach was very conservative: history was regarded as a series of political events that could be written about in an objective way, from the vantage point of the contemporary historian’s superior understanding” (Moran 1993, 159). Claudia Hampton, of course, cannot agree with this opinion since she regards history in a totally different light: “And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons” (MT, 6). Thus, objectivity deprives history of life and advances history’s slipping away into unreality. History becomes subject to statistics and numbers. Tidied up and put into chronological order the past shows no signs anymore of the actual mess it used to be and consequently turns into “grey stuff. Products. Systems of governments. Climates of opinion” (MT, 186).

30 “True Stories and the Facts in Fiction” is the title of an essay by A.S. Byatt to be found in her collection of essays titled On Histories and Stories. Selected Essays (2001).

31 Feelings and emotions were generally and stereotypically considered to be female domains and as thus were neglected in male and objective historiography. Only with the inclusion of a female history and a new emphasis on the private, emotional matters were slowly considered to be worth noting in historiography.

Because Claudia is aware of how chaotic history really is and how the times are often out of joint, she has in contrast to her fellow historians/historiographers deconstructed and fragmented her history of the world. In her opinion, historiography has to mirror the past in all its turmoil and confusion; hence, her history of the world is a non-chronological, multidimensional and passionate narration in which even love and sex feature. Having witnessed World War II and having lost her one true love to it, history is uncomfortably real and personal to her and has lost all its neutrality which explains her radical approach towards history; for her the political has indeed become private. She has experienced history’s public as well as private consequences: “When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are part of it. One has the tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy” (MT, 103). She has understood that public history is always private as well. She cannot distance herself from history.

History, as Claudia stresses, always depends on the eye looking at it and is in fact no

“matter of received opinion” (MT, 14) as some history books want to make their readers believe: “The collective past [...] is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours.

The voice of John Aubrey, of Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you. The signals of my own past come from the received past” (MT, 2). Universal history is to some extent always unique as well: “You are public property – the received past.

But you are also private; my view of you is my own, your relevance to me is personal” (MT, 29). History is really personal and always changes with the one examining it. Consequently, history alters as the times change. Claudia Hampton stresses this assumption in a comparison of her contemporary biography of Hernando Cortez with older biographies on this Spanish conquistador: “Prescott, peering back from Boston in 1843 [...] wrote great history about him. History which is also, of course, a mirror of the mind of an enlightened, reflective American of 1843. Just as my view was that of a polemical opinionated independent Englishwoman of 1954” (MT, 154). Since public history is deeply subjective and personal, historiography is as well. Yet, even Claudia Hampton has to confess that there are certain historical facts that cannot be changed and are “indisputable” (MT, 70). Those pillars of history are unquestionable and to be taken over unchanged by historiographers. Although these facts certainly embody the truth of history it is only private history, public history’s

concomitant, which makes it seem real. Personal histories contain this seemingly unimportant and needless information that convinces us that history is true and a reality:

“There was a spaniel on board of the Mayflower. [...] What I find remarkable about this animal is that I should know of its existence at all, that its unimportant passage through time should be recorded. It becomes one of those vital essentials that convince us that history is true” (MT, 31).

Moon Tiger’s protagonist’s unusual and unscientific approach to history has never really been approved of by her fellow historians. They cannot agree with her “quasi-historian[’s]”

(MT, 14) style of recording history and detest her way of adding “life and colour, [...] the screams and the rhetoric” (MT, 2) to her/story which is supposed to be objective and rather neutral. However, Claudia does not give in to their criticism and continues to personalise what others want to be impersonal:

As a non-professional historian – a “populariser” – she has been loftily disdained by some academics, angrily refuted by others. [...] Reviewers have frequently condemned her out of her own lush and – it must be said – frequently imprecise and contradictory prose. “Technicolor history”, “the Elinor Glyn of historical biography”, “the preaching of an autodidact”; this is the language her critics have used (MT, 59/60).

Indeed, her popular historical biographies seem to miss a certain claim to truthfulness. Her readers can consequently not always rely on her or depend on what she has written. The fact that Moon Tiger is indeed Claudia Hampton’s autobiography underlines the unreliability of the author in general. A memoir depends on its creator’s subjective memories, (relevant) things might have been forgotten or deliberately left out and thus the past can individually be formed. Memory has its special ways, as Saleem in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children declares: “[i]t selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also”

(Rushdie, 211).

Similarly, Claudia’s biographies on influential historical characters may appear more like fiction than examples of accurate historical research. A biographer, just as the writer of an autobiography, revises history by filtering a life through his or her mind. Miss Hampton herself therefore describes at least one of her biographies as a piece of “narrative history”

and as a “tale” (MT, 157) which implies that she is also aware of how she tends to fictionalize fact and she consequently denies her own aspiration to a reality of history. Biography and

autobiography are indeed capable of any combination of truth and fiction, thus denying a classification as either history or fiction.

How easily historical fact can be turned into fiction is described in the episode on the film-making of Claudia’s Mexico book, a biography of Hernando Cortez. With this book Claudia herself slightly blurs the distinct borders between history and fiction by not focusing on what has been handed down by historiography. Instead, her Hernando Cortez is the invention of a new character. The man had already been a myth before Miss Hampton decided to question and expand this myth at her own discretion. The movie, however, disregards all historical evidence and consequently turns out to be a mere “charade” (MT, 157). History is clearly turned into fiction and all aspects of truth and reality are stretched: “

‘I suppose you realise they never actually met in battle?’ says Claudia. The producer gives her a look. ‘Well, we’re stretching a point, eh? Besides, you gave me a long lecture yourself about conflicts of evidence. This is a bit of conflicting evidence’” (MT, 156/157). Claudia is well aware of the closeness of fact and fiction and since history in her opinion depends on the one looking at it she has to accept that there can be no such “thing as absolute truth”

(MT, 14) in historiography. Her history of the world is consequently to some extent a masqueraded history in which fiction and fact clearly mix. This mixture of “fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents” (MT, 1) is emphasized by the use of a “lunatic language that lays a smokescreen of fantasy” (MT, 67) on history and helps to move history to a greater distance instead of bringing it closer to the readers. Regarding history from a subjective point of view might make it more interesting and more readable but it does not, in contrast to Claudia Hampton’s opinion, contribute to make it more real for upcoming generations: “ ‘Sounds like a film,’ says the nurse, ‘the way you tell it’” (MT, 153).

The problem with private histories such as Claudia’s history of the world is that the reader depends on a narrator who is extremely unreliable. Only Claudia, in this case, knows what is fiction and what is fact, whereas one can usually rely on the accounts of conventional historians. Moon Tiger, however, seems to convey that history is fiction and thus unreliable. Although Miss Hampton very much rejects Jasper’s TV series that follows the life of a fictional character at the time of World War II and shows his entanglement with history, her book on the history of the world is, just as her historical biographies, in fact not any different. They all connect the dimensions of public and private history, mix fact with fiction, and, to a certain extent, turn “history into entertainment” (MT, 49). Just as Jasper is

trying to captivate great numbers of viewers by (ab)using history as spectacle, Claudia is trying to attract her readers by romanticizing history. This treatment of the past as entertainment is something Penelope Lively deeply despises. In fact, “[o]ne of the major targets of her criticism is the television industry’s production of slick historical costume dramas, which contribute to the public’s view of the past as picturesque” (Moran 1993, 33).

This view of the past, of course, explains this certain sense of unreality history has for many people.