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Historical fiction and fictions of

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Hsu-Ming Teo
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Macquarie University
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Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 15:2, 297-313, DOI:
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 Rethinking History
Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2011, 297–313

REVIEW ESSAY
Historical fiction and fictions of history

From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern history and American
fiction, by Timothy Parrish, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press,
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2008, 308pp., ISBN 978-1-55849-627-9

History meets fiction, by Beverley Southgate, Harlow, New York, Longman,

2009, 215pp., ISBN 978-1-4082-2012-2

The historical novel, by Jerome de Groot, London, Routledge, Taylor &

Francis Group, New Critical Idiom Series, 2010, 200pp., ISBN 978-0-415-
42662-6

As all readers of this journal already know, over the last few decades
history and fiction have become increasingly entangled, and the proble-
matic relationship between them made public by novelists, literary critics,
historians, historiographers and philosophers of history. The historical
turn in Anglo-American novels has been notable during this time. In a
much-quoted piece that appeared in The Independent in 1999, Booker prize
judge Natasha Walter commented that ‘as we move inexorably towards
the millennium, it’s odd to note that our reading matter seems to be
drifting backwards’ (5). In that year, one-third of the novels submitted for
the Booker Prize were historical in some way – a development that Walter
did not regard as a particularly positive or progressive move for literature.
If novelists have been studying and using the past for their fiction,
academics have also been engaging with history and fiction in various
ways. Since the turn of the century, in addition to journal articles
exploring history and fiction, we have had Diana Wallace’s The woman’s
historical novel: British women writers, 1900–2000 (2005), Lisa Fletcher’s
Historical romance fiction: Heterosexuality and performativity (2008), and
Ann Curthoys and John Docker’s 2005 volume, Is history fiction? – the
second edition of which was released in 2010 with a new chapter
encompassing transnational and world history. The three new volumes
examining various aspects of history and fiction by Beverley Southgate,
Timothy Parrish and Jerome de Groot are important additions to this
growing body of work.

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2011.570490
http://www.informaworld.com
 298 Review Essay
When I was asked to review these three books from the perspective of a
novelist and practising historian, I half expected to take up arms on behalf
of beleaguered novelists. This was because, in the recent Australian context,
historians have attacked the award-winning Australian novelist Kate
Grenville for claiming that her novel, The secret river (2006), was in fact a
work of history, and better history than that produced by historians – even
though Grenville has never made such a claim. In fact, her views on history
and fiction are something that I want to return to at the end of this essay,
when I consider how novelists use history and what the implications of these
three books are for novelistic practice. Reading Southgate and Parrish,
however, I find that it is historians who are besieged, chided for not engaging
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sufficiently with postmodernism and the implications of Hayden White’s

and Keith Jenkins’s work. Parrish has given up on historians altogether and
suggests that we turn to postmodern novels if we want to read postmodern
history. Southgate, for all his stated intention of interrogating the
‘Dryasdust’/‘Gradgrind’ image of the pedantic and pernickety historian
wielding the ‘facts’ of history as a stout disciplinary cane, sets up in its place
the somewhat terrifying and wholly hilarious image of historians as ‘priest-
like figures, whose (literal) self-sacrifice enables them to see further and more
clearly through the mists of the past to what actually occurred’ – or so they
imagine (13). Has he actually met historians who fit this mould? I must
admit I had a few moments of fun imagining my colleagues in such
sacerdotal roles, guarding the sacraments of History and administering them
to reluctant students whose faith is often grudging at best as they figure out
what to do between school and the workforce. Vows of poverty might be
recognisable to certain ecclesiastical colleagues; chastity and obedience? Not
so much.
Jerome de Groot’s The historical novel is one of the finest studies on this
subject to date. It is of immense value to students new to the subject as well
as scholars who are interested in the history, practice and historiographical
implications of historical novels of all sorts – from the postmodern and
literary to the popular. The historical novel is in many ways an extension of
de Groot’s interest in public history, first demonstrated so ably in
Consuming history: Historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture
(2008) which expanded the range of public history and showed the
complexity of grass-roots consumption of, and response to, the commodi-
fication of history. The historical novel similarly treats all historical novels
with equal respect and attention to meaning, purpose and audience. This is a
welcome change because, while feminist scholars such as Wallace (2005)
have explored women’s historical fiction, apart from Helen Hughes’ The
historical romance (1993) – which includes discussion of popular male
historical writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Stanley Weyman and Rafael
Sabatini – most studies of the historical novel have focused on literary and
postmodern fiction. The historical novel begins with a brief but
 Rethinking History 299
comprehensive discussion of the rise of the genre from the early eighteenth
century onwards. Unlike many studies which follow Lukács in beginning
with Sir Walter Scott, de Groot acknowledges earlier antecedents: Marie-
Madeleine de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves (1678, trans. 1679), posited
as ‘the first historical fiction that might be considered a ‘‘novel’’’, and
Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) which ‘dramatises the ways in
which fictions of the past might infect the present and lead to romanticised
madness’ and which ‘demonstrates the ludicrousness of thinking history
relevant now’ (12–13). Gothic novels are given serious treatment, for they
produced histories which are ‘fascinated by the horrific possibilities of the
past’ (15). History in such novels is not ‘a source of information or
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something to understand but . . . a place of horror or savagery’, a ‘charnel

house of remains that still have the power to harm’ (16). De Groot then
provides a succinct discussion of Scott’s nationalistic historical novels, and
Lukács’s reading of Scott, before sketching the differences between the
British historical novel and European versions exemplified by Victor Hugo,
Alexander Pushkin, Gustave Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy. Flaubert’s
‘‘‘historically authentic’ hallucinations’ in La tentation de Saint Antoine
(1849) are particularly interesting, because

Flaubert realised that the novelist’s misunderstanding, or misappropriating, of

history was extremely important to the ways that they might write. In stepping
outside of conventional historicity by having characters out of time appear to
Antoine, Flaubert begins the process of fiction’s unravelling of history which
was taken up tentatively by modernist writers and with gusto by the
postmodernists. (40)

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is then discussed as an exemplary

modernist historical novel which ‘fractures historicity, attacking patriarchal
modes of knowing and being in order to suggest alternative, fluid
knowledges and identities’ (43).
One of the most important and original chapters in The historical novel
examines genre fiction: women’s historical romance novels, men’s serial
military, adventure and crime genres, and a very short section on historical
fiction for children – so often serving educational and exemplary purposes –
from Frederick Marryat to Philip Pullman. The section on women’s historical
fiction draws largely from extant feminist scholarship on the romance novel.
De Groot points out that the simplistic history in such novels – especially
Georgette Heyer’s novels and the Mills & Boon ‘Historical Romance’ series –
often serve a conservative purpose of justifying the political, social and even
gendered status quo, but he acknowledges that this does not have to be the
case. Catherine Cookson’s novels, for instance, ‘presents the past as a place of
privation that might be escaped, where women are particularly downtrodden.
It is a place of poverty, fear, drunkenness, neglect, illegitimacy and dirt’. These
novels therefore critique ‘hegemonic structures such as capitalism, religion and
 300 Review Essay
patriarchy’, suggesting ways in which such historical norms can be challenged
or subverted (56–7). De Groot also considers the commodification of Austen’s
Pride and prejudice, and the production of sequels, before presenting a
fascinating case study on the historical visions and revisions of Anne Boleyn. If
women’s historical romance novels tend towards conservatism, however, so
do men’s adventure and military romances. The novels of Frederick Marryat,
G.A. Henty, R.M. Ballantyne, C.S. Forester, Richard Woodman, Bernard
Cornwell, Patrick O’Brian, Simon Scarrow and Dudley Pope, for example, all
celebrate conservative nationalistic narratives. De Groot is in his element here,
with original and insightful readings of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe
novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike women’s historical novels
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which often problematise or subvert the dominant gender order, de Groot

argues that men’s historical novels tend to reinforce hegemonic masculinity as
‘straightforward, dutiful, resourceful, violent and homosocial’, yet also
‘martial, honourable and active’ (79–80). De Groot’s analysis extends beyond
the text to look at genre fiction’s obsession with paratextual material –
‘footnotes, additions, acknowledgements, bibliographies, author informa-
tion, maps’ – as well as its dialogic connection to its fan-base who, especially in
the case of male readers of military fictions, seek authentification and
interaction with scholarly history.
The remaining chapters in The historical novel deal with literary and
postmodern fiction, providing brief but perceptive readings of recent
historical novels. De Groot argues, like Southgate below, that ‘bourgeois
novels’ ‘take the tools of postmodern historiographic metafiction and make
them mainstream and popular’, but then he points out that historical fiction
has always questioned historical authority and legitimacy (100). The
characteristics that Linda Hutcheon claims for postmodern historiographic
metafiction – contrariness, indeterminacy, self-reflexiveness, subversiveness,
a philosophical ‘meditation upon history and identity’, and the ‘problema-
tising of ordering narratives’ – have ‘always been present in historical novels
since their inception’, even as many historical novels, postmodern or
otherwise, also propagate an undoubtedly conservative agenda (119–21).
The historical novel concludes with brief considerations of the ways in which
fiction has challenged existing historical narratives from the perspective of
the marginalised and disenfranchised: women, indigenous peoples and
postcolonials. These themes, as well as the narrative and linguistic
challenges fiction poses to history as elucidated in the work of Hayden
White, Keith Jenkins and Linda Hutcheon, are taken up and expanded more
meticulously and at considerable length in the next two books. However, de
Groot’s The historical novel is outstanding for its ability to cover such a wide
and complex range of historical novels as well as extant scholarship from the
traditional to feminist, postcolonial and postmodern, and to communicate
the significance of these arguments so accessibly and with such elegant
succinctness.
 Rethinking History 301
Of the three books examined here, Southgate’s History meets fiction
explains the fictive nature of history most eloquently and painstakingly in a
volume dedicated to dismantling the notion that history and fiction are
‘mutually exclusive opposites’. The argument running through this book is
simple enough, and familiar to most by now: history is not an ‘objective’,
‘scientific’ or ‘verifiably true’ rendering of the past because of its literary
nature. It depends on written sources which are imperfectly remembered by
its authors; subjectively constructed narratives which are the fragmentary
remains of a complex and multitudinous past which has been lost to us.
Historians come along, select evidence according to their own individual
biases, assumptions and ideological purposes, then string all this together
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into a narrative that is plotted in much the same way that fiction is plotted,
and which uses the same rhetorical devices as fiction to produce a piece of
work about the past that bears the hallmarks of the nineteenth-century
‘realist’ novel. History and fiction are thus ‘inseparably intertwined’ (20), for
both tell stories about the past which are, in the words of Hayden White,
‘verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found’ (14).
Yet historians, so the argument goes, are apparently still reluctant to
acknowledge the fictive nature of their enterprise. Instead, it has been left to
novelists to explain and popularise these critiques to historians and the
general public, for ‘novelists and dramatists have managed, far better than
theorists themselves, to ‘‘popularise’’, or make more widely accessible, such
key issues in historical theory as those concerning truth, relativism, memory,
ethics, and identity’ (xi).
The first chapter of History meets fiction explicates this argument.
Chapter two, ‘History: fact or fiction’, then explains how the boundary
between fact and fiction is blurred, and how this has been recognised and
represented by novelists. The Romantics, in particular, posed a challenge to
the ‘objective’ or ‘factual’ nature of history and thus were predecessors of
postmodernists, who continue the ‘tradition of sceptical questioning of any
absolute distinction between history and fiction’ (31). If all this is familiar
enough to be banal, what follows is an original and insightful discussion of
how Truman Capote’s In cold blood (1966) – the journalistic novel-history
telling the story of the massacre of a Kansas farmer’s family in 1959 –
anticipated postmodernist critiques through its meticulous historical
research of primary sources, blurring of fiction and fact, and its complex
narrative construction without a straightforward beginning, middle and end.
This is followed by a fascinating discussion of Penelope Lively’s Cleopatra’s
sister (1993), where Southgate brilliantly teases out the connections between
Lively’s novel and the problematising of historical methodology. Chapter
three, ‘Dryasdust and Co.’, examines how, since the ‘professionalisation’ of
history in the nineteenth century, historians have come to be represented as
soulless, tedious pedants with a ‘factual’ knowledge of the past, but without
much empathy for it or for other people. Chapter four explains how and
 302 Review Essay
why memories – out of which historical evidence is constructed – are
problematic, and why history based on such evidence is therefore inevitably
fictional. The critique of history and memory in Proust’s Remembrance of
things past (1920–27) and T.S. Eliot’s The cocktail party (1950) are discussed
to show how writers of fiction and poetry were ‘ahead of the game in terms
of historical theory and practice’ (96).
Chapter five, ‘Fiction, history, and ethics’, makes the altogether
astonishing claim that, in their search for an ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’
account of the past, historians (and other intellectuals) throughout the
twentieth century have been ‘cut off from the social and political realities of
their time’, disdaining to intervene ‘at all in public life’ (99). Historians have
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apparently justified such ‘professional withdrawal’ as a virtue ever since

ideological involvement by British and German historians ‘before and
during the Great War’ led to ‘blatantly nationalistic production’. Thus,
it is only recently, at the turn of the twenty-first century, that some historians
have begun to question that cultivation of detachment, and that a serious
debate has been joined about the purposes and possible utility of history in
political and ethical contexts.

Sven Lindqvist’s A history of bombing (2001), Dagmar Barnouw’s The

war in the empty air: Victims, perpetrators, and postwar Germans (2005)
and Jamil Hilal and Ilan Pappe’s Talking to the enemy (2006) are
provided as examples of historians whose ‘applied history’ integrates
accounts of the past with a profound morality and ethical purpose. This
erroneous assertion merits discussion below. Suffice it to say here that, in
contrast to historians, novels such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and peace (1868)
and Wyndham Lewis’s little-known Time and western man (1927) are held
up as models of fiction which have adopted a moral position to history
and proposed ‘an ethically directed history with a specifically humanitar-
ian and pacifist agenda’ (124). Thus, fiction writers have once more
shown historians the way.
Chapter six, ‘Fiction, history, and identity’, notes that ‘history underpins
identity’ and yet this is problematic, because identity is not unitary or fixed,
but fragmented and provisional. Historians continue to write biographies as
though this were not the case, whereas André Gide’s The immoralist (1902)
and Tim O’Brien’s In the lake of the woods (1995) problematise identity and
its relation to the past. Chapter seven discusses the purpose of history and
argues that, although historians can point to the myriad utilitarian skills
produced by a training in historical methodology, they are less certain about
the value of history when it comes to the question of content. This is because
history is ‘not some natural monolithic structure, which is just there . . . but
rather a hybrid entity incorporating choices made with particular purposes
in mind’ (150). While Southgate acknowledges that this is ‘by no means a
new claim or revelation’, he argues that
 Rethinking History 303
it is writers of fiction who, in a widely accessible form, have more recently
provided historiographical illumination – who have, that is to say, deliberately
and explicitly shed light on history’s darker corners, by revealing afresh the
inevitability of its ideological involvement and its function as a vehicle for
politics. (157)

He then proffers Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963) as an example of a literary

work which is also, in the words of Robert Holton, ‘a postmodern
historiographical novel – a novel about representation as well as about
historical events’ (157). This might well be true; V is undoubtedly a brilliant
novel and, again, Southgate’s analysis is well-worth reading, but I have
never come across anyone who has accused Pynchon of being ‘widely
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accessible’. Indeed, it requires an explanation such as Southgate’s own

accomplished reading of Pynchon’s novel, or his explication of Don
DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), to convey the
full extent of these novels’ historiographic purpose.
The remainder of History meets fiction returns to its original premise,
accusing historians of being ‘left in fiction’s wake – ‘‘running after
novelists’’’ as far as the form and content of history is concerned (181).
This is because of historians’
unwillingness, or inability, to think beyond the paradigms and parameters of
disciplines as they currently exist; and a willingness and ability to do that is
more likely to be seen in areas where practitioners do not fear, but rather pride
themselves on, such matters. (182)

Having reiterated his argument many times, Southgate then concludes

that, although it is not possible to talk of historical ‘truth’ or ‘certainty’ in
‘any way that is finally and irrefutably distinct from fiction’ (195), we
nevertheless
still need to make distinctions between differing and sometimes conflicting
accounts of what happened in the past; there does seem to me to be a need to
acknowledge some sort of authenticity or ’truth’, however ultimately
unattainable, by reference to which, however tentatively, to make those
distinctions. (197)

We do this by weighing up the limited evidence, much like a judge and

jury in a law court – an analogy that inevitably recalls E.H. Carr’s example
in What is history? – and making a distinction ‘on the basis of varying
degrees of probability’ (175). Unbelievably, it takes a whole book explaining
the virtues of novelists’ practice over that of historians, only to reach this
prosaic conclusion which the overwhelming majority of historians have long
accepted.
The best thing about this book is the perceptive, absorbing and
persuasive analyses of the historiographical practices to be found in various
novels. These are a delight to read. If History meets fiction is intended for an
 304 Review Essay
undergraduate audience, then it explains simply and clearly the arguments
of Hayden White and Keith Jenkins with regard to history and fiction, while
illustrating these arguments superbly through the works of novelists. But if
History meets fiction tells students a lot about literature and history, it tells
them almost nothing new or – dare I use the terms – ‘accurate’ or ‘truthful’
about the contemporary state of history as it is practised. It becomes
blindingly obvious throughout this book that, while Southgate has a
comprehensive knowledge of intellectual historiography, the philosophy of
history and historians’ own anxious and sometimes shrill defences of a
seemingly besieged and imperilled discipline, he actually has very little
acquaintance with the vast body of works that constitute contemporary
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history. It is troubling that most of the claims about the distinct, antithetical
nature of history and fiction are made by historians from the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, buttressed with quotes drawn from a handful of
contemporary historians about the nature of history. A quick glance at the
bibliography reveals a paucity of notable historical works over the last half
century – a mere half dozen or so.
There is an inevitable imbalance in Southgate’s argument, arising from
his neglect of actual historical works. Southgate would not simply make an
argument about the novels he examines based on literary critics’ writings or
reviews of the novels; he takes the trouble to read the novels himself – with
great reward for us as far as his acute analyses are concerned. And he also
chooses some of the finest, if sometimes most obscure, works of fiction to
make his argument about fiction and historiography. Why, then, does he
depend overwhelmingly on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
historiographical writings and historians’ memoirs, rather than reading
some of the most important works of history over the twentieth century?
Where are the historical works from the Annales school, or those influenced
by anthropology, feminism or postcolonialism? If the nature of historical
evidence and its interpretation are at issue, anthropology and its
importation into cultural history, especially through the work of Clifford
Geertz, both enriched and challenged the interpretation of symbols and
historical evidence, drawing attention to history’s obviously fictive qualities.
Think of the debate among historians that raged over Robert Darnton’s
interpretation of symbols and the ‘overdetermined’ narrative he constructed
about apprentice printers and their revolt in The great cat massacre and
other episodes in French cultural history (1985). Reading works such as this
would bring the realisation that historians, especially cultural historians,
have been aware for quite some time of the issues Southgate raises regarding
the fictive nature of history, especially when they read ‘against the grain’ to
tease out of scant evidence glimpses into the lives of the marginalised. The
insights fiction brings to history and memory have also been highlighted by
practitioners of biography and oral history over the last few decades.
Historians are perfectly aware that they fictionalise, especially where facts
 Rethinking History 305
are scarce, to create a coherent narrative of an individual life. Indeed,
Martha Hodes has openly admitted to doing this in The sea captain’s wife
(2007), the absorbing story of Eunice Connolly, who crossed racial lines to
marry a black sea captain after the American Civil War, while Clifton Crais
and Pamela Scully subtitled their 2009 book Sarah Baartman and the
Hottentot Venus, a ‘Ghost story and a biography’ because so much of Sarah
Baartman’s life had to be conjectured. Perhaps a future work on the
‘borderlands’ where history meets fiction might bypass the old and outdated
polarities of history vs fiction, and begin instead with those histories that
self-consciously fictionalise their material.
However, nowhere is Southgate’s profoundly problematic lack of knowl-
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edge about actual historical works so clearly on display as in the chapter on

‘Fiction, history, and ethics’, where he argues that historians have not until
very recently applied history to an ethical purpose. Labour history is but one
example of historians who work with an ethical purpose in mind: the historical
understanding and future improvement of the lives of workers. Since the
Second World War any history of Europe, and of Nazi Germany in particular,
has been geared towards attempting to ensure, however unsuccessfully, that
genocide does not occur again. In the US since the 1950s, American
ethnohistorians of Native Americans have charted the violent, genocidal
history of the European conquest of North America at the expense of
indigenous peoples. Such work often had a profoundly moral purpose,
especially in providing evidence for Native American tribes to take their
grievances of dispossession to the United States Indians Claims Commission.
In Australia and New Zealand, historians of indigenous peoples have also
performed similar functions, with the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand, and
the championing of indigenous native title rights by Australian historians such
as Henry Reynolds. In the area of postcolonialism, whether one agrees or
disagrees with him, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) was literary history
written to expose the historical racism and literary colonisation of ‘the Orient’
which became precursors and counterparts to its actual colonisation. Its intent
was to trace the damaging legacies of Orientalist discourse in American neo-
imperial attitudes to the modern Middle East. Subsequent postcolonial works
have been concerned with constructing a counter-history to the traditional
story of triumphant European imperialism and the spread of civilisation to the
barbarous regions of the world, or the myth of Europeans’ magnanimous
decolonisation when colonies ‘grew up’. Meanwhile, the New Imperial
histories have challenged the long-held notion in British domestic history that
the empire was ‘out there’ and had little influence on ordinary Britons’ lives. In
India the rise of Subaltern Studies has not only reclaimed history for the poor
and marginalised in India’s national story, but has also generated heated
debates about the fictive qualities of such interpretations, especially revolving
around the question of whether the ‘subaltern’s’ voice can actually be
recovered.
 306 Review Essay
To take another significant example, the whole foundation of women’s
history and feminist history has been geared towards righting an injustice
and gaining equality for half the population. The neglect of feminist
scholarship – both literary and historical – is one of the glaring omissions in
History meets fiction. This is a pity, because women’s historical writing
actually supports some of the arguments Southgate is trying to make. As
Bonnie Smith (1984), Mary Spongberg (2002) and Diana Wallace (2005)
have shown, since the seventeenth century, women who were shut out of the
historical profession because of their gender attempted to hurdle these
barriers by writing historical fiction. Especially in the aftermath of the mid-
seventeenth century French civil war known as the Fronde (1648–52),
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French noblewomen wrote ‘fictitious’ memoirs which ‘blurred the bound-

aries between fact and fiction’ as women ‘tried to insert into the historical
record personalities, events and activities that would otherwise have gone
unrecorded’ in official male histories (Spongberg 74). Through their fiction,
women writers ‘attempted to bring to history a moral truth they believed to
be lacking in the more general histories of the past’ (Spongberg 102). These
novels critiqued male-dominated histories for simply focusing on ‘the
quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilence in every page; the men
so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all’, as Catherine Morland in
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey famously put it.
In short, because of an ignorance of contemporary historical writing – as
opposed to historiographical writing – History meets fiction seems rather
irrelevant to historians. None of its ideas is original or new, although they
are well-explained. Moreover, there seems to be a lack of understanding or
appreciation about the communal nature of historical work, and yet this is a
crucial aspect of the profession that sets it apart from fiction. When novelists
write historical fiction, we are the alpha and omega of the past world we
have constructed. Right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate, plausible or not,
the fictional past is ‘true’ within the confines of the novel. Once a novel is
published, unless sequels follow, the history told in the novel is usually
closed off and finished as far as the author is concerned. For most practising
historians, however, historical writing is not a hermetically sealed world; it
exists in an ongoing conversation with past, current and future historical
writing. This is because, while historians strive towards some metaphysical
‘truth’ about the past, we know we will never get there. What we produce are
more-or-less plausible explanations of the past, and the more probable we
find an interpretation, the more weight we give it, until it becomes an
approximation to ‘truth’ as we know it for the moment. Contrary to
Southgate’s accusation that to label an historical work as ‘definitive’ ‘implies
that some perfect match has finally been attained between the historical
account and what actually happened; there is no further room for
improvement’ (196), a ‘definitive’ work of history is one which not only
shows a mastery of extant evidence, but of other historians’ interpretations
 Rethinking History 307
as well, producing the most persuasive explanation of the historical
phenomenon to date. But this is always subject to change because of the
communal nature of historians’ work – something which is seen in the
processes of peer review and paper-presentations at conferences and
seminars where feedback is sought, and where historical interpretations
presented are challenged and sometimes revised. All this is to state the
obvious to historians, but it means that, while there are many similarities
between history and fiction, there is an important difference arising from
historians’ communal practice of history and their accountability to other
historians and to new evidence if it comes to light, as opposed to novelists’
god-like, near-total control of our historical worlds once we start writing.
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The communality of postmodern history is something which Timothy

Parrish discusses in From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern
history and American fiction. Parrish’s book has a fairly simple argument.
Taking his lead from Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon, he argues that
history is a narrative art, and that postmodernism and multiculturalism have
challenged the unified history of white progress and upward mobility
presented in popular histories of the Parson Weems/Founding Fathers type
that populate the bestseller lists – here exemplified by Walter Isaacson’s
Benjamin Franklin (2003), Joseph Ellis’s Founding brothers (2000) or David
McCullough’s John Adams (2001). Popular histories are the target of
Parrish’s attack; he is not really interested in academic histories, because
they neither sell enough nor have much impact ‘on the national conversation
about American history’ (197). American history, then, is popular history,
and it has failed to come to terms with the narrative challenges presented by
poststructuralism and postmodernism, remaining stuck in the groove of the
‘realist model’ of the nineteenth century, even though the ‘realistic narrative
model has been a museum piece since James Joyce’ (19). Parrish’s
contention is that if we want to read examples of postmodern history, we
must look to postmodern novels such as William Faulkner’s (admittedly
high modernist but, in fact, proto-postmodern) Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Cormac McCarthy’s Blood meridian (1985),
Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), Joan Didion’s Democracy
(1984), Don DiLillo’s Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997), and Denis
Johnson’s Fiskadoro (1985). These books are ‘postmodern metahistorio-
graphies’ as Hutcheon has defined the term, because they are concerned with
‘what historical narrative is, who masters it, who distributes it, who receives
it, and who controls it’ (2). From the Civil War is worth reading if only for
Parrish’s insightful exegeses of these novels.
For Parrish, American history in its current state is unacceptable. What
is preferable is a counter-history – or rather, many counter-histories – which
challenges the Manifest Destiny story that the white nation tells itself. These
counter-histories dissect the corpse of ‘America’ to uncover unending
historical cycles of violence. They reveal that there is no American nation,
 308 Review Essay
only splintered communities bound together by their own particular,
localised narrative constructions of the past; communities who reject an
overarching history dominated by the mainstream (northern) white
community. Parrish begins with the post-bellum defeated South of
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Faulkner unashamedly rejects the concept
and history of the ‘United States’ in favour of a local, communal history of a
‘people whose homes have been invaded and destroyed by United States
forces’ in an act of home-grown US imperialism (3). Absalom, Absalom!
celebrates a secessionist southern social order that remains defiantly
unconquered and unassimilated to ‘America’, but which ultimately sees no
place for African-Americans in this history. Morrison’s Beloved is a revision
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of this version of history, speaking to and for the African-American

community of slave-descendants through the figure of the runaway slave
Sethe. Like Faulkner, however, Morrison’s Beloved challenges the conven-
tional metanarrative of ‘American’ history and is, moreover, uninterested in
whether she persuades other Americans of the ‘truth’ of her history as long
as her narrative is accepted as the new orthodoxy by the African-American
community of slave-descendants who still remain unintegrated into the
prosperity and promise of the ‘United States’. Parrish argues that ‘the
postmodernist critique of history cannot be separated from the rise of
multiculturalism’ (2), for multiculturalism

argues not only for an American society of diverse peoples, but also an
American history that is at odds with itself because no point of view exists that
fairly encompasses the experience of all Americans (African Americans, Native
Americans, Anglo Americans, Chinese Americans, and Hispanic Americans,
among others). (3)

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood meridian – the ‘First and Last Book of

America’ which foresees the nation’s end in its brutal birth – also condemns
American history as the history of violent imperialism, but there are no
simple victims in this story; all groups, white and non-white, are implicated
in a cycle of never-ending violence. Thus ‘Blood Meridian depicts American
history as a series of violent encounters and ultimately unsuccessful attempts
to establish a history other than the murderous one implied when the
‘‘civilised’’ Europeans enslaved or eradicated the ‘‘savages’’ they encoun-
tered’ (85). And what is true of American history is true of history in
general.
Blood meridian is one of my favourite American novels, but it is worth
pointing out that the violent dispossession and genocidal encounter of
Europeans and Native Americans was not new to historians in the 1980s.
Similarly, the revisionist critique of American history as the story of the
spread of an empire has been around since William Appleman Williams’
work in the 1960s. There does not seem to be anything specifically
postmodern about such interpretations of American history.
 Rethinking History 309
These themes are picked up in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, a counter-
history which ‘presents a critique of history and its reliance on slavery and
the oppression of minority ‘‘others’’’ (41), while also showing that it was the
combination of the Enlightenment philosophy of science and the European
imperative to conquer and colonise that resulted in America’s history of
brutal massacre. Ultimately, Parrish argues, ‘Mason & Dixon is the history
of an experiment in democracy that was doomed to fail from the beginning’
(38). Again, postmodern or not, this argument is nothing new to historians
even if it has sometimes failed to persuade. Parrish then turns to the present
day, using Didion’s Democracy and DeLillo’s Underworld to reveal how,
despite attempts to reveal the devastating history of the US in the twentieth
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century, the ‘unlikely past masters of (post)modernism – advertising

consultants, politicians, FBI heads, and CIA operatives – employ their
technical narrative know-how against the interests of citizens who, for the
most part, can only helplessly collaborate with that which is destroying
them’ (41). The book ends with a discussion of Johnson’s Fiskadoro – a
strange pre-9/11 novel about a post-9/11 world where America exists under
a government which is apparently Muslim and multicultural. This, Parrish
argues, ‘reminds us that history is inseparable from myth’ (41), for it is
narrative that ‘orders the world’ and compels belief. Thus, history ‘can only
be the story that you believe to be true’ (233).
Parrish celebrates these postmodern novels and contrasts them to ‘the
practice of history departments’, arguing that ‘history as a genre and as a
popular practice has still not come to terms with the narrative insights of the
great modernist masters such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel
Proust’ (16). One could observe that the vast majority of fiction has not
either. More to the point, however, if postmodernist histories are simply
self-conscious postmodern novels which, in a multicultural society, compel
belief among specific, local communities through the cohesive power of
narrative, then what makes any of these postmodernist histories different
from, say, an old-fashioned Zionist belief in the Old Testament as the
history of a chosen people destined to inhabit the promised land? The Bible
contains the requisite ingredients of violence, genocide, slavery, Manifest
Destiny, victims who become perpetrators of oppression and who
perpetuate further cycles of violence – and it binds a community together.
If all history is based on faith and a will to believe among a community, then
why should the Founding Fathers/Manifest Destiny story not be believed by
successful white Americans since it meets the needs of their particular
community and binds them together? And if they want to believe in it even if
it excludes other groups, what is wrong with that, since Faulkner’s
celebration of the secessionist south is considered valid history for its
particular white community even though it excludes African-Americans?
Incidentally, from the perspective of a non-American, it seems incredible
that Parrish can support the idea of the existence of a Confederate South
 310 Review Essay
which has not been absorbed or integrated into the history of the US.
Whatever historical narrative southerners might want to believe, the South
has assented to the wars in foreign countries waged by the American
military. Southern politicians have voted in favour of war, and southern
troops – including an over-preponderance of poverty-stricken and
opportunity-poor African-Americans in the military – have participated in
killing people abroad. From a foreigner’s point of view, the dead and their
survivors do not much care whether these groups dissociate themselves from
the history of ‘America’ and its violent imperialism since they killed and
waged war in the name of the ‘United States’.
Coming back to the idea of postmodern history as the narrative which
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binds a community together, why should Parrish condemn Philip Roth’s

works for ‘celebrat[ing] and confirm[ing] the kind of mainstream exception-
alist American history that is practiced by such modern-day Parson
Weemses as David McCullough’ (32)? Parrish complains that ‘the America
that allows [John] Updike’s Harry Angstrom to become rich and successful
does not seem that different from the America that allows Jewish American
Philip Roth to become a prize-winning American writer’. But if this is
Roth’s experience, as it clearly is, then why is this not a valid history? In the
absence of any (outmoded) discussion about what makes for good history
(only stubbornly pre-postmodernist historians apparently care about this),
are histories only valid if they are doom-laden, apocalyptic denunciations of
the American Empire? Does this not elide the lives of those – immigrants
and ethnics included – for whom the ‘American Dream’ has been a reality of
sorts, disenfranchising them as Americans? A more complex and nuanced
understanding of history would be able to account for both the success of
such lives as well as simultaneously acknowledging the legacies of violence,
dispossession and discrimination on which such successes have been built.
Any postmodern novel/history that simply inverts the story of Manifest
Destiny into a jeremiad remains trapped in the myopia of the original Great
Story of American success. It fails to challenge the profound narcissism of a
national history that has made claims to being an example of the best of
humanity, and now makes claims to being the worst of the worst in history.
Reading Southgate’s and Parrish’s books, it is difficult to escape the
conclusion that there is something acutely irritating about historians to
postmodern historiographers and literary critics. Parrish paraphrases
Robert Berkhofer to make the point that ‘the discipline of history, with
its nearly two-century-old belief in concrete facts and ‘‘true’’ narratives
confirmed by rigorous methodologies, has, among the human sciences, been
the most resistant to the insights of postmodernism’ (9). I wonder whether it
is not the pique of being ignored which prompts such tediously repetitive
attacks on historians. I do not believe that all historians ignore
postmodernism; even Southgate points out that Richard Evans finds certain
things about postmodernism to admire and emulate. However, while these
 Rethinking History 311
works on history and fiction based on White, Hutcheon and Jenkins
challenge the implications of historians’ work, particularly the truth status of
history, they do not necessarily transform the methodologies that historians
use to search the archives and produce history; certainly not in the way that
Geertz, Foucault or Derrida, for example, equipped historians with new
methodological tools. Even if historians simply shrug and accept the
postmodernist implications of narrative for history, what then? Basically, we
still have to engage in the painstaking task of going through the archives for
whatever fragments are left of the past and, yes, determining the
‘authenticity’ and value of such evidence, or compiling the remnants of
real historical figures into a plausible history. Regardless of Jenkins’ seeming
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belief that all primary evidence is equally fictional and equivalent in value,
being ‘raw material’ and ‘all that stuff’ (Curthoys and Docker 6), nobody
would argue that it wasn’t important to discover that, say, the Donation of
Constantine or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forgeries. And
whatever claims Parrish might make for the truth of the history of Beloved,
Sethe did not exist as an historical figure; Toni Morrison does. The insights
of postmodernist historiographical metahistory, therefore, probably have
not made much of an impact on the academic discipline of history, because
its significance seems to lie in the meaning and status, rather than the actual
practice, of history.
What about the implications of postmodernist historiographical
metahistory for novelists? Parrish makes a convincing case for Morrison
regarding her novel Beloved as a work of history, and perhaps DeLillo as
well. It is less clear that the other novelists he discusses regard their own
novels as histories equivalent to, or even supplanting, the academic
discipline. The prosaic fact is that most novelists who write about the past
depend on some kind of distinction between history and fiction. Whatever
the problematic qualities of primary sources, and whatever fictive qualities
may inhere in historical works, in researching the historical background for
our novels most writers act as though history and archival material provide
some sort of accurate or plausible insight into the past. We would not bother
doing historical research if this were not the case, nor would so many of us
add paratextual material to our novels to display the evidence of our
research and, hence, our right to represent the past. In the words of Ian
McEwan: ‘The writer of a historical novel may resent his dependence on the
written record, on memoirs and eye-witness accounts, in other words on
other writers, but there is no escape: Dunkirk or a wartime hospital can be
novelistically realised, but they cannot be reinvented’ (quoted in de Groot
172).
Furthermore, novelists freely acknowledge that novels are not history,
because we make things up. Despite unfounded accusations by Australian
historians that Kate Grenville thought The secret river was a work of history
superior to that of historians, Grenville herself emphasised that ‘I drew
 312 Review Essay
heavily on historical events and characters, but . . . I was changing them for
my own novelistic purposes. At no time did I ever make the claim to be
writing any kind of history’; ‘I don’t think The Secret River is history – it’s a
work of fiction. Like much fiction, it had its beginnings in the world, but
those beginnings have been adapted and altered to various degrees for the
sake of the fiction’ (2007). James Bradley, whose novel The resurrectionist
(2006) is discussed by Jerome de Groot as an example of a novel which
‘elegantly creates a dialogue about national character and self-definition
through its historical setting, reclaiming ‘‘British’’ history for a postcolonial
[Australian] audience’, has commented that ‘Although there’s quite a lot of
historical material in [The Resurrectionist], it’s very definitely not history,
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and since I made quite a lot of it up, I’d be very uneasy about anyone
treating it as history.’ For Bradley,
novelists can and should write about whatever they like however they like:
their authority is conferred by their artistic ability, not their accuracy. They
have no duty except to themselves and their audiences. If they present work as
‘historical’ that gets a little blurrier but I still think we need to remember it’s
fiction. (Bradley 2010)

In 2005, Curthoys and Docker posed the question, ‘Is history fiction?’ in
the title of their book. The books reviewed here invert the question and ask,
‘Is fiction history?’ Well, sometimes it can be, as Southgate and Parrish show
with regard to a select few novels, though by no means all that are discussed
in their works. Yet if historical fiction is not always history, de Groot shows
that it is always historiography.

Hsu-Ming Teo
Macquarie University
hsuming.teo@mq.edu.au

References
Bradley, James. 2010. Email to author, October 9.
Curthoys Ann, and John Docker. 2010. Is history fiction? 2nd ed. Sydney: UNSW
Press.
Fletcher, Lisa. 2008. Historical romance fiction: Heterosexuality and performativity.
Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.
Grenville, Kate, 2007. History and fiction. http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_
River_History%20and%20Fiction.
Hughes, Helen. 1993. The historical romance. London: Routledge.
Smith, Bonnie. 1984. The contribution of women to modern historiography in Great
Britain, France, and the United States, 1750–1940. American Historical Review
89, no. 3: 709–32.
Spongberg, Mary. 2002. Writing women’s history since the renaissance. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
 Rethinking History 313
Wallace, Diana. 2005. The woman’s historical novel: British women writers, 1900–
2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Walter, Natasha. 1999. The Seductions of the Past; Can all this pretty detail
substitute for imaginative engagement with a writer’s own times? The
Independent, August 30, 5.
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