I definitely didn't mean to imply that I felt you had no right to comment, sorry about that - it was unintentional.
There's a huge difference between the examples you give (flat Earth, anti-semitism) and the example we're discussing, viz. the importance or otherwise of sticking to what is generally agreed to be historical "truth" when writing about the French revolution, and especially the characters involved. By way of a thought experiment (as I said above, this is not what I actually think most likely to have happened, far from it), suppose that I did really believe that Desmoulins and Danton were sleeping together - what is it about that belief that would distress you? It's not a contradiction of something that can be proved with absolute certainty (I wouldn't be able to prove they had been, and equally, no one could prove they hadn't), and it's definitely not a belief that would directly harm other people, as in the anti-semitism example.
Having read your other comments - they arrived while I was writing this! - I think perhaps one key difference between our views is that I don't see fictionalization, even very creative, far-from-known-fact fictionalization as a lack of respect. If you see writing that doesn't stick strictly to known fact as inherently disrespectful, I guess that helps me understand why these ideas bother you - it seems like our underlying ideas of respect are very different.
I do agree that historians shouldn't - at least in an ideal world - invent things, but I have very little trust in the idea that people CAN adhere to the truth even if they want to, or that, beyond some things like dates, there is much value to be attached to "truth" at all. I'm sure that if we were to summon Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins through time, and put some questions to them, we'd three incredibly different sets of answers, even if they all thought they were being entirely truthful. For me, that diversity is pleasing and exciting, one of the best things about narrativizing either in a historical-factual or a historical-fictional context.
(Are you, yourself, a historian? I only ask because you're, as it were, "sticking up for them" and for slightly more traditional ideas of truth and factuality, so I just wondered if you were in the field professionally. I'm not a historian myself, I just read lots of history - my real area is literature, so perhaps it's not surprising that I embrace the fictive.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-10-18 06:41 pm (UTC)There's a huge difference between the examples you give (flat Earth, anti-semitism) and the example we're discussing, viz. the importance or otherwise of sticking to what is generally agreed to be historical "truth" when writing about the French revolution, and especially the characters involved. By way of a thought experiment (as I said above, this is not what I actually think most likely to have happened, far from it), suppose that I did really believe that Desmoulins and Danton were sleeping together - what is it about that belief that would distress you? It's not a contradiction of something that can be proved with absolute certainty (I wouldn't be able to prove they had been, and equally, no one could prove they hadn't), and it's definitely not a belief that would directly harm other people, as in the anti-semitism example.
Having read your other comments - they arrived while I was writing this! - I think perhaps one key difference between our views is that I don't see fictionalization, even very creative, far-from-known-fact fictionalization as a lack of respect. If you see writing that doesn't stick strictly to known fact as inherently disrespectful, I guess that helps me understand why these ideas bother you - it seems like our underlying ideas of respect are very different.
I do agree that historians shouldn't - at least in an ideal world - invent things, but I have very little trust in the idea that people CAN adhere to the truth even if they want to, or that, beyond some things like dates, there is much value to be attached to "truth" at all. I'm sure that if we were to summon Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins through time, and put some questions to them, we'd three incredibly different sets of answers, even if they all thought they were being entirely truthful. For me, that diversity is pleasing and exciting, one of the best things about narrativizing either in a historical-factual or a historical-fictional context.
(Are you, yourself, a historian? I only ask because you're, as it were, "sticking up for them" and for slightly more traditional ideas of truth and factuality, so I just wondered if you were in the field professionally. I'm not a historian myself, I just read lots of history - my real area is literature, so perhaps it's not surprising that I embrace the fictive.)