Daniel Aaron
FICTIONALIZING THE PAST
"Saucy lictOTS
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad's out a' tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Oeopatra boy my greatness
0' th' posture of a whore."
A kind of novel is being written today that may be best
described as extrafictional or pseudohistorical. More fiction than fact,
it boldly mixes historical events and real personages with invented
ones-usually with satirical intention. The historian, John Lukacs,
calls it "novelized history," for want of a better name, but it might just
as well be labeled "factitious" or "sham" history, for it is contrived and
synthetic. It is not written to instruct or to illuminate or to recreate the
American past. It makes little use of myth or legend. History in such
novels furnishes props for the fictive decor. The authors employ as
principal characters people who were or are history-makers themselves
and imagine them as they might have been but were not. History itself
may feed the plots, but it is history idiosyncratically conceived as
burlesque, parody, hallucination. " Novelized history," whether it
denigrates or celebrates, usually trivializes. It is present minded and
future oriented rather than backward looking, its account of the past
derisive rather than affectionate or forbearing or contemplative. Its
purpose is ulterior.
Novelized history is likely to be written during periods of fear and
social dislocation when the fictive imagination is susceptible to
catastrophe and nightmare. At such times the writer is encouraged to
read his own terrors into the cosmos and almost obsessively sniffs the
rot and evil of his times. Not invariably, but often, the writer will
present his Wasteland in the form of black farce as Nathanael West
did in his lunatic novel of the 1930s Depression,
A Cool Million-a
