Thom's The Problem of Credibility

Thom, James Alexander. The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction. Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest, 2010. Print.

James Alexander Thom was formerly a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. He is the author of Follow the River, Long Knife, From Sea to Shining Sea, Panther in the Sky (for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel), Sign-Talker, The Children of First Man, and The Red Heart. He lives in the Indiana hill country near Bloomington with his wife, Dark Rain of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. Dark Rain is a director of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Planning Council. The author's Website is: www.jamesalexanderthom.com.

The concern of history and the concern of language, for that matter, is a question of truth. What is true? What is the truth? Language is never ending. An utterance communicated does not end with the last word but moves to the listener, the reader for interpretation and meaning. What was said? What does it mean? I think those are two different questions.   History, like language, is never ending. When an event is recollected, it becomes a history, and even when that remembering seems to end, people are still looking for "the truth" or another history of that event. So I see language and history always being partial to the extent that there is space unaccounted for -- gaps and fissures. How are we to fill in these gaps and fissures in truth? What do we call that which we do to fill in the gaps? I think it is the work of fiction, and I think that because we need fiction to fill in the gaps that we cannot talk about "the" truth but rather "a" truth. And so here, we are getting at how I see the English classroom being something more than literature. I see the English classroom as the place of examining the gaps and fissure of story. Some say everything is an argument (Graff) and some say everything is a narrative (Schaafsma). I think they are one and the same. We tell a story because we are sharing our argument. We make an argument because we have a story to tell.

I began this project thinking about what a novel can do that nonfiction could not. I wanted to think about what a piece of historical fiction like Ben Mikaelsen's Tree Girl  could say about the genocide of 200, 000 Mayas in the Guatemalan Highlands in the 1980s could do that a nonfiction text could not do. I think I can make a good argument for the way fiction can represent a truth and appropriate a metaphor for the purposes of expressing themes of resilience and cooperation so inherent to Maya life and the depict Mignolo's rhetoric of modernity through the logic of coloniality in its characterization while considering its young adult audience.  However, I am beginning to see how this novel leaves fissures in need of further inquiry, and that is why it is important to read -- not for what it does but for what it does not do. It does not tell the truth; it tells a truth. When frame for this story has a beginning and an ending; that which history does not. The language of Gaby's story, the protagonist, stops when the book is closed, but the meaning does not.

What James Alexander Thom discusses in his book about the craft of writing historical fiction is the problem of credibility, or to be more specific: the problem of too much credibility.  Thom talks about readers being misled by the credibility of the author of historical fiction, but I would argue that readers are often misled by texts more generally, and this, we may see, might be the renewed objective of the new English classroom: to see all texts as both a story and an argument. Indeed, readers can learn a great deal from reading; we can learn "facts" from the writer. Many such texts, specifically historical fiction pieces, contain indexes and bibliographies because writers are great researchers -- a combination of novelist and historian. However, despite bibliographies and even prologues that state "this book is a novel, everything in it is true and can be verified in research references" or "this novel is based on historical events," the writer must draw on inferences to tell a story. There is a certain degree of verisimilitude.

Truth is the aim of inquiry but most of the greatest theories are actually false; however, such inquiry does constitute progress with respect to the goal of truth, so it is possible, according to Karl Popper, for one false theory to be closer to the truth.  And with  literature or creative writing, verisimilitude has the property of seeming true, of resembling reality. As discussed in my post  about Slater's meme, how language makes imitation possible, in order for text to hold persuasive for an audience, it must be grounded in a seeming reality. So we can think about mimesis as evolving into versimilitude rather than being a copy or reproduction of an idea. As we discussed in the post about Slater's meme, a meme is imitated but never copied, so ideas are shared but are never exact thus always alive and taking shape through transmission. Here we cannot talk about history as being true or of a text being "fact" because historical "fact" must be interpreted and then crafted into a story by a writer for a reader who then interprets this new text for "fact" or a "truth."  Of course, inferences are influenced by one's own expectations and personal bias and experiences, but when we come to a text that has any version of the word "history" in it, readers tend to let their guard down and take up the "historical" as "the" truth rather than considering the rendering or fiction that is inherent in any text.

I would like to make a distinction here between verisimilitude as a "likeness or semblance of truth" and something altogether different which would be...what...that which is not at all like the truth or some form of essentializing even. Thom recounts a situation where he read historical fiction, one that had a claim about being true and verified by references. He says that he tried to verify the author's version of some story by finding others who had accepted this author's account, talking to other authorities on the topic and eventually writing his own version in one of his novels.After coming upon some "obscure scholarly refutation," Thom realized he had perpetuated a myth in his novel. The original novelist had started a "false" version, and because of Slater's meme, this idea of history kept recirculating. Is the lesson here to go to the beginning? Where does a story begin? What truth can you verify? No text can be credibly enough, but I don't think that is the point -- whether it is historical fiction or memoir. For a reader to glean any truth, the text must reflect realistic aspects of human life and the writer must be able to render the story to have the credibility that promotes the willing suspension of disbelief in the reader.  The novel, and history, and language, contained in a text (a beginning and an end contained on a page)  is a total illusion of life within itself. It is a closed fictional world (even if it is label nonfiction, memoir, autobiography, biography, essay). The credibility then cannot come from research and "facts" or accounts of an event; the credibility must be seen in terms of the text's own internal logic. While the reader's inference and interpretation pose a problem for mimesis; the answer to this problem is to see verisimilitude as a technical problem to resolve within the context of the novel's fictional world or the memoir's rendering of the writer's world.  The truth of a text is in its internal logic but the verisimilitude of this logic will always be deferred because the text's grounding in the real can always be contested.

A text is always a site of struggle (most of the time a political, social or economic struggle) over the real and its meanings. What is truth? What is verisimilitude? As an English teacher, we can think about these questions in every text we read, but I think that the novel, particularly the historical fiction novels, offer a site of entry for our audience (middle and high school students) to do inquiry. In making sense of the novel's internal logic, the reader is faced with his own ignorance of the past. What is truth? What is fiction? What are the remainders that have settled into the fissures of the narrative waiting further inquiry?