Barnard
History Professor Mark Carnes Examines the Accuracy
of Historical Novels in Novel History: Historians
and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each
Other)
New
York N.Y., July 5, 2001 -- It was a conversation
with his 10-year-old daughter about My Name
Is Not Angelica, a book about a slave rebellion,
that led Professor Mark Carnes to the idea for
his new book Novel History: Historians and
Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other),
published this spring by Simon & Schuster.
When
asked by his daughter "is this story true," Carnes
replied "Does it really matter?" This exchange
started Carnes thinking about the need for historical
stories to be both truthful and entertaining,
and the general question about where truth is
found in fiction.
Edited
by Carnes, Novel History brings together
twenty renowned historians, each of whom has written
an essay examining how accurately the historical
novel mirrors the past. Among the authors whose
novels are examined in the book by historians
are John Updike, Jane Smiley and Tim O'Brien.
Although the historians are sometimes critical
of the novelists, rather than offering a series
of critiques, Carnes notes, Novel History
becomes an on-going dialogue, about the relation
between the "real" historical past and the imaginative
emotional renderings of it."
Paul
Boyer, writing about John Updike's Memories
of the Ford Administration says, "Viewed as
a book about history, the novel is concerned less
with Ford, or even with Buchanan, than with the
nature of memory; the process of writing history;
and indeed whether 'the past' can be recovered
at all in any authentic sense, by professional
historians or anyone else." He adds, "One of Updike's
central themes is the self-delusion of historians
in thinking that they can re-create a past time
period, or even an individual
life, through the crude methods and limited, semiopaque
sources available to them."
John
Mack Faragher, writing about Smiley's A Thousand
Acres says, "I believe that A Thousand
Acres is an exemplar of what the historian
and the historical novelist Thomas Fleming calls
a 'novel of the historical imagination.'" He adds,
"It would be ludicrous to argue that the novelist
shares the historian's responsibility to account
for complications, contradictions, and conundrums.
First and foremost, novelists must tell a good
story."
Novel
History is the sequel to Carnes' 1995 book
Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies,
where he explored the rendering of history through
movies. Here he examines the often blurry line
between truth and fiction and the use and misuse
of the past by the artist. Although Past Imperfect
was lauded by critics (for example it was hailed
by The New York Times as being "incisive
and witty") Carnes was not completely satisfied
with the collection.
"Past Imperfect had only begun to explore
the tangled conceptual realm that lies somewhere
between art and history and yet encompasses both,"
Carnes says. And so, he chose the historical novel
as his next object of study since, as he says,
"historians and historical novelists do many of
the same things in much the same way. In comparison
to moviemakers, who persuade audiences through
their use of visual detail, that their reconstruction
of history is most accurate, novelists, like historians,
reconstruct history through their use of words."
The desire to recreate the past is evident through
the making of movies such as Pearl Harbor and
Titanic, Carnes notes. "The proliferation of historical
movies and the popularity of historical theme
parks is evidence that there is a marked craving
among people to recreate the past. My interest
lies in the extent to which these renderings of
the past are credible."
Despite
the fact that filmmakers, writers and historians
remember the past in different ways, Carnes says
that all can learn from each other. "The past
exists only in our remembrance of it," he says.
"Historians can benefit from the filmmakers' often
inspired visualizations of the past, and from
the novelists' guidance on the workings of the
emotions and imagination. But in the end, the
facts do matter. We must at some point attempt
to sort out what was true, and what was not."
Carnes,
who is at work on a revision of an American history
textbook, has won praise for his scholarship.
The American National Biography, published
in 1999, of which he was co-editor, was described
by The London Times, as "the most ambitious
logistical project" of any American organization
"since putting a man on the moon." The New York
Review of Books called it "a defining artifact,
at the end of the twentieth century," of American
culture. For his work on Past Imperfect
and Novel History, Professor Carnes was
recently described by The Chronicle of Higher
Education as a "genrebuster and baiter."
Carnes
received his B.A. from Harvard College and his
Ph.D from Columbia University. Specializing in
American History, he is currently a professor
of history at Barnard College, the college for
women affiliated with Columbia University.
Reflecting
his interest in alternative ways of learning history,
Carnes has also developed at Barnard a unique
pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, in which
college students, after immersion in source material,
assume roles as historical figures in a series
of games including: Democracy at the Threshold:
Athens in 403 B.C.; Rousseau, Burke and Revolution
in France, 1791; and Freud, Jung and the Nature
of the unconscious, among others. The project,
part of Barnard's First-Year Seminar, is funded
by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of
Post-Secondary Education of the U.S. Department
of Education.
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