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PARTISAN REVIEW
narratology to follow their example." Catching up, in effect, with a
position that Stegner had articul ated several decades earlier, Genette
fails to consider, however, the case of historica I fiction (whether as
novel, play, or poem), which has always had to cross this borderline and
to use both fictional and historical techniques.
John Updike confessed that in thinking about doing historical fiction
about an actual person, James Buchanan, his "imagination was frozen
by the theoretical discoverability of
everything.
An actual man,
Buchanan, had done this and this, exactly so, once, and no other way.
There was no air." Georg Lukacs's
The Historical Novel
(I962)
dealt
with the problem of respecting the singularity of historical persons and
events by having the novelist focus instead on the general milieu, make
protagonists fictional, view actual historical persons through the eyes of
other people, and avoid dealing with well-known episodes in the careers
of historical figures.
Cynthia Ozick has sharply formulated the issue in
Quarrel
&
Quandry
(2000).
As a novelist, she would like to believe that "imagi–
nation owes nothing to what we call reality; it owes nothing to history."
By definition "a work of fiction cannot betray history." Yet the point of
her title is that "there are certain difficulties." Notable among them is
her objection that in the popular Broadway version of Anne Frank's
story, "history was transcended, enob led, rarefied," leaving out or dilut–
ing not only its grimness but also her "consciousness of Jewish fate and
faith." She also objects to William Styron's
Sophie's Choice
and Bern–
hard Schlink's
The Reader
because their protagonists (a Polish Catho li c
and an illiterate Gestapo agent, respectively) deflect from the historical
fact that Jews were the specific target of Hitler's genocidal racism; and
middle-class and educated Germans were comp li cit with the atrocious
cr imes committed in his name. Typicality is not the obligation of a nov–
elist, as she says, yet in these two cases it is the historical importance of
the Holocaust that makes the books targets of her criticism. That is the
quandry.
Her way out of it is to concl ude that history has its rightful claims on
a novel when the fiction is "directed consciously toward history." She
suspects both authors of attempting to deflect their readers away from the
more typical Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Yet she acknowledges that
both authors recognize the atypicality of their protagonists. Why should–
n't that entitle them to more artistic freedom than she is willing to give
them? Anyway, the question of the intentions of both authors is a histor–
ical one, requiring more evidence and argument than she presents. But her
crucial point is that poetic license is not always immune to criticism. A
