A good story = truth?
03/05/2010 21:48
This is a slight elaboration of (my side of) an email discussion we're having in my history writing class:
I've been planning on building my story around a series of characters/families. I'm thinking of this as a way to try to merge a sort-of microhistorical focus on personality with all the demographics and economics you usually get in social histories like Roberta Balstad Miller's City and Hinterland or Margaret Walsh's Rise of the Midwestern Meatpacking Industry. I thought both these books were really effective, but both would have been more powerful with some people in them.
But since we're writing history rather than biography, we've got the dilemma of picking "the right" people. I suppose they need to be representative of something I'm talking about, but there's the rub. What are they really representative of? My thesis, or what life was really like for a lot of people in these times and places? Or some exceptional experience that goes against the grain of the majority and sheds light on others by contrast?
Maybe this is less of an issue for other people, if you don't claim to be speaking for a large, overlooked population. In the long run, one of my ambitions is to say something about "rural people." So I'm sensitive to the possible criticism that the folks I've picked aren't representative enough, and don't speak for their communities. But maybe that complexity is helpful, because it draws attention to the fact that the rural population is no more uniform than the urban.
Another way to look at it, which I find seductive, is to follow the story and then see what insights it leads to. I'm usually annoyed by novelists who say they let their characters lead them, because a lot of them overplay that metaphor. But there's something to the idea that fictional characters usually have an internal consistency -- and that we think they should because that makes them "lifelike." On that basis, we might also expect historical stories to "lead somewhere" if we let them.
I know this could lead to an argument about narrative in non-fiction, and deconstruction, and all the way to cognitive theory if we let it. At this point I'm less interested in why it works, than in whether it actually works. And I suspect (don't know, but hope) that a good story, told well, has something in it. Or it wouldn't attract our interest in the first place.
I'm don't mean to imply that there isn't a lot of construction between my discovery of the story's insight and the reader's. Heather Cox Richardson said she used a technique in her forthcoming book on Wounded Knee "in which I talk about the American worldview in harsh, square images and straight lines, while I talk about the Indian worldview in gentler images and curved lines. (Factories have
square brick walls that slice the view; Indians camp near the wandering creeks that carve the rolling hills...)" I thought this example was a great one. Linear, angular Americans vs. curvy, conforming-to-the-terrain Indians. It's incredibly artificial and manipulative at an almost subliminal level, when you think about it. But it and other techniques like it could be the reason people "get" the story at a deeper level than where they merely understand her argument and agree or disagree with her conclusion.
So anyway -- back to picking characters. This afternoon I finished a 1,217-row spreadsheet covering everybody known to have lived in Ashfield from 1790-1840. I've got all the census data, as well as all the Vital Records, town tax rolls, and local history/genealogy. I now know a lot about who lived and died in Ashfield, and where the other folks went, if they didn't die there (a much bigger number than I'd expected). I think this data will help me argue several points about migration, persistence, and local attitudes toward the outside world. I plan to do this for each of the places in my story. But this isn't the story.
People have gotten away with that sort of thing in the past. Hal Barron, for instance, in Those Who Stayed Behind. But it's dry reading, isn't it? All setting, no actors. I kept thinking, as I was reading it, "yeah, this makes sense. But did anyone who lived then actually feel this way?" Not for nothing Carlo Ginzburg's mother was an award-winning Italian novelist.
Bottom line: I want to spend some time telling the reader about these wonderful, bizarre people I found. This one Ashfield guy, Samuel Ranney, after being harrassed by the local church, actually sends them a letter pre-emptively excommunicating them! I love this guy! Does he single-handedly refute Perry Miller? I suppose not. But he does suggest there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
I've been planning on building my story around a series of characters/families. I'm thinking of this as a way to try to merge a sort-of microhistorical focus on personality with all the demographics and economics you usually get in social histories like Roberta Balstad Miller's City and Hinterland or Margaret Walsh's Rise of the Midwestern Meatpacking Industry. I thought both these books were really effective, but both would have been more powerful with some people in them.
But since we're writing history rather than biography, we've got the dilemma of picking "the right" people. I suppose they need to be representative of something I'm talking about, but there's the rub. What are they really representative of? My thesis, or what life was really like for a lot of people in these times and places? Or some exceptional experience that goes against the grain of the majority and sheds light on others by contrast?
Maybe this is less of an issue for other people, if you don't claim to be speaking for a large, overlooked population. In the long run, one of my ambitions is to say something about "rural people." So I'm sensitive to the possible criticism that the folks I've picked aren't representative enough, and don't speak for their communities. But maybe that complexity is helpful, because it draws attention to the fact that the rural population is no more uniform than the urban.
Another way to look at it, which I find seductive, is to follow the story and then see what insights it leads to. I'm usually annoyed by novelists who say they let their characters lead them, because a lot of them overplay that metaphor. But there's something to the idea that fictional characters usually have an internal consistency -- and that we think they should because that makes them "lifelike." On that basis, we might also expect historical stories to "lead somewhere" if we let them.
I know this could lead to an argument about narrative in non-fiction, and deconstruction, and all the way to cognitive theory if we let it. At this point I'm less interested in why it works, than in whether it actually works. And I suspect (don't know, but hope) that a good story, told well, has something in it. Or it wouldn't attract our interest in the first place.
I'm don't mean to imply that there isn't a lot of construction between my discovery of the story's insight and the reader's. Heather Cox Richardson said she used a technique in her forthcoming book on Wounded Knee "in which I talk about the American worldview in harsh, square images and straight lines, while I talk about the Indian worldview in gentler images and curved lines. (Factories have
square brick walls that slice the view; Indians camp near the wandering creeks that carve the rolling hills...)" I thought this example was a great one. Linear, angular Americans vs. curvy, conforming-to-the-terrain Indians. It's incredibly artificial and manipulative at an almost subliminal level, when you think about it. But it and other techniques like it could be the reason people "get" the story at a deeper level than where they merely understand her argument and agree or disagree with her conclusion.
So anyway -- back to picking characters. This afternoon I finished a 1,217-row spreadsheet covering everybody known to have lived in Ashfield from 1790-1840. I've got all the census data, as well as all the Vital Records, town tax rolls, and local history/genealogy. I now know a lot about who lived and died in Ashfield, and where the other folks went, if they didn't die there (a much bigger number than I'd expected). I think this data will help me argue several points about migration, persistence, and local attitudes toward the outside world. I plan to do this for each of the places in my story. But this isn't the story.
People have gotten away with that sort of thing in the past. Hal Barron, for instance, in Those Who Stayed Behind. But it's dry reading, isn't it? All setting, no actors. I kept thinking, as I was reading it, "yeah, this makes sense. But did anyone who lived then actually feel this way?" Not for nothing Carlo Ginzburg's mother was an award-winning Italian novelist.
Bottom line: I want to spend some time telling the reader about these wonderful, bizarre people I found. This one Ashfield guy, Samuel Ranney, after being harrassed by the local church, actually sends them a letter pre-emptively excommunicating them! I love this guy! Does he single-handedly refute Perry Miller? I suppose not. But he does suggest there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
