roachboy

alot of historical fiction sits on the methodologies of romantic historians like michelet--they have a tons of data around them, rely on imaginative projection to mobilize that information and frame the results around the conventions of a novel. there are lots of versions---i am not a fan of straight historical fiction personally--i prefer the more self-conscious variants, like thomas pynchon, william vollman (his series on the history of america is amazing), john barthes (sotweed factor, giles goatboy)...

in poetry, charles olson's maximus poems are an astonishing rewrite of conventional american history and are serious scholarship to boot--and the work of paul metcalf is way too little known for stuff of such beauty and power....susan howe's earlier stuff is in this general tradition and is also lovely, if difficult at first.

i am a historian by training and employ and often think that the main differences between fiction and non-fiction when it comes to staging the past is
(a) the number of footnotes and
(b) that alot of the "non-fiction" is done by shitty writers.

side note 1: i generally stay away from american history written my americans (there are exceptions, but in general) because there is a methodological and political naivte in american history writing that allows one to write sentences that say stuff like "americans think that..." or "the american mind thinks that..."

i dont know what these could possibly mean.
you find this stuff everywhere in the regular histories.
i generally take the appearance of phrases like this as an index that the writer is not very skilled as a writer, no matter how good they might be as a researcher (there is VERY often a gap which separates these skills--don't get me started on it..i can blab at length...)

b) the most complex tradition of historical fiction/sociological fiction i know of is french---the main line of it runs from balzac through zola and proust, but it extends all over the place in french fiction.
vollman and pynchon seem to reference it.
very smart and very lovely---they dont treat people as stick figures in the way that alot of the straighter hist-fiction tends to--more like machines that perform their identities. it's an interesting way to think about people... less representational.

nice thread to resurrect, shani.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite