CUSHING STROUT
9S
reading of historical fiction is not a matter of wholesale response any
more than a reading of a historian's work need be.
An excellent current example of the use-not the abuse-of poetic
license is Tracy Chevalier's
Girl with a Pearl Earring
(2000).
She invents
a maid to the painter Johannes Vermeer in the seventeenth-century
Dutch Republic. We see everyth ing from her point of view, a Protestant
young woman who, out of economic necessity, becomes a maid to a
higher-class Catholic family. She has an artistic eye, as the painter real–
izes, so she finally enjoys the high privilege of sitting for the portrait that
has become known as "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Most women in Ver–
meer's paintings are engaged in domestic actions and are seen in relation
to the interiors of the rooms they inhabit. Two figures have only a black
background, and one of these is dramatically distinguished by looking
over her shoulder at the viewer, her lips parted expectantly, as if she is
responding to a vo ice and is about to speak.
It
fits the novel's depiction
of a sexual undercurrent sometimes running between the artist and his
model, though it never results in action that would violate the social
barriers between them.
The point of the novel is not to answer the question, "Who sat for
this intriguing portrait?" Perhaps no one ever did. We shall never know.
The success of the novel is that its story about the genesis of the paint–
ing fits the social context of the Dutch Republic and the style of Ver–
meer's artistry, by making something eloquent, restrained, and moving
about ordinary domestic life. The novel does not aim to fill in a gap in
the historical record.
It
enhances our response to Vermeer's portrait.
In
the
'930S
John Dos Passos invented a complex border-crossing
technique in his trilogy,
USA,
that covered several decades, involved fic–
tional stories, an authorial stream-of-consciousness ("Camera Eye"),
newspaper headlines, and biographical sketches of famous persons with
whom the fictional stories are emotionally resonant. Some of the biogra–
phies (Thorstein Veblen, Sacco and Vanzetti, Frank Lloyd Wright) are
icons whom Dos Passos celebrates. Historical persons, however, are not
intermingled with fictional ones, for Dos Passos had the traditional sense
that the line between the fictional and the historical, though it could be
crossed, should not be eradicated or entirely confused.
In
I941,
at a time
of international crisis, he turned to writing history himself.
It
was the
sort of Whig history that searches for a useful past to provide a "a sense
of continuity with generations gone before" by finding "what kind of
firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found
to stand on." He used his novelist's sense for narrative and the humanly
significant detail; but he was writing a kind of history in
The Ground
