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Nicholas Jose

ANY RESEMBLANCE IS UNINTENDED

Many creative writers have used historical material in their work. Nicholas Jose reflects on his own use of such material and on issues which this has raised. How important is historical accuracy to the creative process?

When strangers ask what I do for a crust, I sometimes admit I’m a writer. Then they will ask what I write. I reply: Novels, mostly. Then the next question comes: Fiction or non-fiction? I used to think this was a dumb response, but on reflection I have come to see that it points to something interesting. Fiction and non-fiction are really little more than labels, like different kinds of ice cream. They are a convenient way of dividing up the space in a bookshop, a way of having two different bestsellers lists. But any attempt to analyze the concepts more rigorously, particularly in terms of a distinction between fact and invention, quickly runs aground. The response also suggests that for many people novels are the generic form of book, which befits the catch-all origins of the term. Within that, fiction and non-fiction are two different types of the same thing. I don’t think that too many of us would really have trouble with the idea of a fictional novel and a non-fictional novel. We would know what was meant.

Another way of saying that is to suggest that history is a kind of literature. It’s not the thing itself, but a way of writing about it. When Shakespeare’s plays were first published together, they were subtitled: Histories, Tragedies and Comedies. A history was a genre, a kind of play, a way of shaping material. For the Greeks too, history was a literary mode to set alongside epic and lyric, tragedy and comedy. For the Chinese, history was a lofty genre that ranked with poetry and philosophy. Prose fiction, as in many traditions, was a johnny-come-lately, a hybrid form highly conditioned by social circumstances. But in the grander sense of ‘poetry’—what we might call imaginative writing—fiction has also been around a long time as a relative of history writing, even if sometimes a bastard relation.

Macaulay saw the two modes as complementary and wanted to combine them into one grand and more effective kind of writing. He recognized that history must be ‘received by the imagination as well as the reason’ if it were really to work on people. He took Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction as a model for his own historiography, adding that, although there were ‘good historical romances and good historical essays’, there were not yet ‘good histories’: ‘a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated’ to produce ‘a compound of poetry and philosophy’. Perhaps that’s what we are all groping towards, from our different perspectives: ways of exploring what has happened that will connect with people.

The question of which is better is one of those chestnuts that invite endless speculation, like the battle between the Ancients and the Moderns, or the goddess Juno’s inquiry into which gender has more pleasure making love. In our own time, as genres bend and truths are doubted, with everything that is solid melting into infotainment, there’s also a degree of anxiety about the fuzziness of the borderline between fact and fiction. Historians and biographers are moving controversially into ‘making it up’ territory, as in the recent biography of Ronald Reagan where the biographer writes himself in as an invented bit player, while novels that treat historical material are likely to get a problematic reception, at least in Australia. To mention a few recent examples: David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise and Peter Robb’s M. Perhaps this reflects a sense of fragility about Australian history. It is too close, too raw, too contested. It can easily erupt into a war zone, as in the Demidenko affair. Sometimes it may involve a feeling of being cheated, as in the fast-and-loose play with actuality in films like Life is Beautiful or Shakespeare in Love. It is a defining condition of the times, which takes particular and more edgy forms here. Let me note in passing that within a couple of years of each other two of our best writers, one notionally a novelist, the other a professional historian, have both brought out books with the same riddling title: True Stories. I’m thinking of Helen Garner and Inga Clendinnen. In the latter case, it’s the title for a series of lectures on black-white relations in Australia, including the story of the Stolen Generations, a set of facts that, in being evoked through the archetypally heart-rending story of a lost child—think of Moses in the bulrushes, think of the Slaughter of the Innocents—now demands a morally and emotionally right ending. It has entered the powerful realm of story, where popular wisdom takes over the narrating. It cannot be put back in the bottle. It is no longer about then, it is a story we are in the middle of living now. Its power as story comes as it weaves back into the stories told, many orally, from the past. Its authority as story comes, in Walter Benjamin’s insight, from its connection with natural history: from Death itself.

In practice, however, the relationship between storytelling and fact is not so highfalutin. As a novelist, the stage of the process I have come to dislike most is the last stage: the dotting of the I’s and the crossing of the T’s. The usual advice for a novelist is to write the book first and do the research afterwards. That’s why it’s in the final stages of fiddling details into place that you can really get in a mess. The past is a large presence in my work and a central inspiration, and in a general sense the research is already done, from reading and remembering, looking and hearing, as I put together a subject. But there are always things that need checking.

I have published two novels that, in contrasting ways, could be considered historical. The first is The Rose Crossing, set mostly in 1652 on an island in the Indian Ocean, where a group of Chinese and a group of Europeans meet and, among other exchanges, breed a new kind of rose. I knew the rose existed, but beyond that the story is imaginary. I have described it variously as a historical fantasy and a contemporary fable. It is alternative history, a counterfactual. But for that to work it had to be possible in fact, not merely as something that might conceivably have happened, but as something that might actually have happened and been hitherto overlooked by historians. The broader theme of the novel is the hybrid nature of change. Two of the main characters, the English scientist and the Chinese eunuch, have allegiances to fallen dynasties. They ponder whether the course of history can be changed by conscious human intervention, or whether the results of such attempts are doomed to be unpredictable or even to run counter to the original purpose. The germ of the idea came during those years in the late 1980s when I was working in China. I was able to look at Australia’s history within a different and larger framework from that I was used to, at precisely the time when intellectual energies were being expended in Australia to reconceive our future in relation to Asia, a process that involved reassessing our past in order to find the traces of alternative trajectories and lineages. In other words, I hoped to be responsive to history, and responsible to it, but to do so in my novelist’s way, through informed speculation that challenged habitual ways of seeing the past. That, in turn, was a contribution to shaking up the present.

What I could not change was botany. The basis of my speculation was that a botanical specimen can provide the key to a hidden history. Plants have means of travelling and changing that are denied to humans. It was imperative that my story be compatible with the botanical facts of breeding, cross-pollination, grafting and hybridizing, the time it takes, the odds of this or that outcome, and so forth: and the book was already in page proofs when I was still fine-tuning my handling of the botanical details. Not only is the devil in the detail, the Good Lord resides there too, as Flaubert and then Aby Warburg have said. Certainly it is only possible to conjecture about the meanings of history if the little things are right. In this sense a novelist is no less of an empiricist than a historian.

I am obsessed with getting the detail right. The obsession grows more powerful as the final form of the book approaches, as if the more I have a belief in my creation the more I want it to be unflawed by factual inaccuracy. Sometimes that involves being clear about what is allowed by virtue of poetic licence. The other novel of mine that I think of as historical is so in a very different sense. The Custodians is a story of people of my own generation, in Australia from the 1950s to the 1980s. It avails itself of the publishers’ necessary disclaimer: ‘All characters in this novel are fictional. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is unintended.’ But I also added a more elaborately worded explanation of my own: ‘The Custodians is a work of imagination and as its author I am responsible for the fictional reinterpretation given to details and other suggestions drawn from primary reference material.’ Imagination. Authorial resonsibility. Fictional reinterpretation. Primary reference material. These words attempt to establish the status of what is written, leaving room for creative freedom while also acknowledging areas of moral accountability. That’s also a way of saying that my story is only one story, but one that hopes to weave in with other stories that have been told or will be.

Part of the story is set in the area around the New South Wales–Victoria–South Australia border, and involves a place with many resemblances to Lake Mungo. Lake Mungo is a major historic and archaeological site in Australia. It is also a key symbolic site. So many issues and questions intersect there, most still unresolved. For this book, a novel, I wanted to be able to think about some of those things in an imaginative way, from different perspectives to those which a policy-maker might use, and I did not want to appropriate or implicate the specific realities of one place with my own personal imagined and no doubt simplified version. With a move that only a fiction-writer can resort to, I changed the name of the lake to Lake Moorna and relocated it further west, to the other side of the Darling River, so it would be clear that my novel was a speculation. This may have reduced the sales the book would have had as a travelogue. But the speculative note was crucial to what I was doing. It carries right through to the ending, which offers an imagined version of how reconciliation might feel. Yet for those moves to have any plausibility at all, the fine detail of the novel had to be as accurate as possible, and even then, despite my best efforts, I know that there is risk. It is a precarious and vulnerable business. In this case, since it covered times and places that many of my readers would know, it is also much easier to be proved wrong than in my story set on a remote island in 1652.

The Custodians has a precise grid of dates and places, and the crisscrossing of the characters is central to its theme. It’s February 1969, we’re told at one point. That same month we’re in a Sydney apartment where someone is playing a song: Round and round . . . round and round are its words. It could be the Joni Mitchell song The Circle Game. I discovered, when fact-checking as I went through the page proofs, that that particular song was a hit in February 1970. I was reluctantly ready to change it when I found that Judy Collins had recorded it and released it long before Joni Mitchell’s own version and that aficionados might well have been playing her version of it in February 1969. So I left it.

Thank God too for my American editor who takes nothing on trust. That same February I have my characters driving from Adelaide to Canberra. They note the town names: ‘Wagga Wagga, Gundagai, Junee’, I had written. He emailed me: do they take the northern or the southern route? Either they go through Gundagai or Junee but not both. He had checked the atlas. I meant Jugiong, not Junee, and Jugiong is what appears in print.

It’s in the last stage of editing, when the book is locked into its schedule, that these questions arise and you’re made aware of what tricks memory and imagination can play. That’s also when you think of the lawyers. In the case of the Joni Mitchell song, originally I quoted a few more lines that made it clear which song it was. I had to seek permission to quote those lines. As anyone who has done it will tell you, seeking permissions, especially to quote songs, which are now owned by large companies like Sony or Time Warner, is a drawn-out and outrageously expensive business—and is in a sense based on a legal fiction that these companies actually created the works you want to quote. In the end it’s easier to give up, to find an alternative solution. In my case I cut the quotes down to a little phrase that could come from anywhere and is not copyrightable: round and round . . . round and round. But that’s a distortion that works against historical accuracy and the precise historical texture of the book. More generally the law makes fiction-writers cover up rather than acknowledge their primary sources, for fear of being accused of plagiarism. This again is a distortion, promoting the myth that what is to an extent collaborative writing, dependent on records, collections and interpretations made by others, is all invented out of one person’s head. The same thing happens more dramatically to ward off defamation cases. Names are routinely changed and characters disguised beyond recognition. Helen Garner has said that in The First Stone she fictionalized one real-life person as several different fictional characters to avoid the risk of legal proceedings.

The tactics and disclaimers become ever more convoluted, yet actuality keeps up its cachet. People like it to be a true story. Writer after writer at the recent Adelaide Writers Week introduced themselves by saying that they were not the person who wrote their works. They were merely body doubles. The work came from somewhere else. It was a product of imagination and craft and they did not want its opinions attributed to them. Yet questioner after questioner nevertheless went on to ask if the work was based on the writer’s own experience. That’s the natural question. The movie The Insider, based on the tobacco industry whistle-blower’s story, has a slippery disclaimer about certain events being changed for dramatic effect, then at the end tells you what happened to the man in real life after the film ended, blurring over the discontinuity between the dramatic character the film creates and the real, non-fictionalized person. Yet no matter how dutifully you disguise a character, people will seize on one recognizable detail and it becomes, in that reader’s mind, someone actual. We seem to be very complex creatures when it comes to questions of representation, willing to be deceived, yet not completely. All of which makes for a territory of ambiguity that fiction-writers occupy, rigorous in attention to shared facts, yet ultimately concerned with creating a different kind of truth.

Inga Clendinnen says of fiction, distinguishing it from history with perhaps a touch of envy: ‘There are no rules here.’ Yet think of the power of great fiction to embody a profound historical understanding of the world. Think of Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. And bad history in fiction of course means bad fiction. Historians rightly share a professional suspicion of fiction. Novelists, I think, are respectful of historians. Yet in our quest for new narratives we are compelled at a certain point to kick away the scaffolding and enter an imaginative domain where the facts, always open to multiple interpretations, may not answer every question.

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