On History, Historical Fiction, and Historical Fantasy
When people learn that I am both a history professor and a fiction writer, they assume that I write historical fiction, which I do not. That is not to say that the practices of my two passions are unrelated as almost all of my published short stories and debut novel have been profoundly influenced by my study of the past. But the reason I have never been tempted to write a conventional historical novel became clear to me during a reading event I once attended of an author whose work I enjoyed very much.
(When History’s Mirror Is Warped.)
In the Q&A session, the writer addressed an element in his historical novel that was anachronistic to the time period it was set in. In justifying its presence, he spoke of two considerations when making narrative choices, the historical and the poetic. While he made every effort to make the plot historically accurate, he asserted that the violation of known facts about the past was warranted when it served an essential literary purpose—for instance, in emphasizing a theme’s relevance to contemporary concerns. I found the explanation reasonable, but I realized that I myself could never resort to that.
In the course of my training as an academic historian, I have been inculcated into adhering strictly to established protocols of research and writing. For that reason, I just cannot bring myself to knowingly engage in anachronism in a narrative that purports to represent the reality of a bygone time, even in fiction and even when there is a good ‘poetic’ reason to do so.
To be perfectly clear, this is a matter of personal preference, not one of trying to establish a rule for historical fiction in general. I am not one of those ‘history buffs’ who gets a kick out of denouncing every historical error in novels and movies; I do not believe that a work of academic history and historical fiction should be held to the same scholarly standards; and I have a general abhorrence of literary rules that limit creativity. The novelist whose reading I attended produced a superb novel, but its historicity is based on literary principles that I just cannot apply in my own work.
As challenging as it can be to do due diligence as a historian in engaging in thorough research, checking the reliability of sources, and considering multiple perspectives, it is a process that I find deeply rewarding. But I also have a creative side that craves the pleasure of the free play of the imagination, creating stories and characters without having to worry constantly about evidence and citation.
So in the course of my writing career, whenever I felt constrained by working within the disciplinary rules of academic history, I fled to writing fiction, only to return to history when I yearned to engage with the concrete reality of the past once more. When I sought to write fiction with historical themes, however, I was faced with a dilemma in that I wanted to make full use of my creativity but I was also wary of infringing on my scholarly commitment to telling the truth about the past.
There is a sub-genre of speculative fiction that has sometimes been referred to as historical fantasy, many examples of which take place in environments that greatly resemble specific historical periods but still present themselves as imagined worlds. In such works, the magical and supernatural elements that are the hallmarks of most fantasy narratives tend to be minimal or even non-existent as the emphasis is on the narratives of individual characters within the development of imagined histories.
An early example is Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, or the Unfullfill’d Queen (1978), a novel of courtly intrigue that was obviously inspired by England during the reign of Elizabeth I but takes place in the fictional kingdom of Albion that is ruled by a queen named Gloriana I. Guy Gavriel Kay has specialized in this sub-genre, his most recent works set in worlds based on China (called Kitai) during the Tang dynasty (Under Heaven) and the Song dynasty (River of Stars) and Europe in the 15th century (Children of Earth and Sky and A Brightness Long Ago). Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman’s Riverside novels take place in a city that resemble London in the Tudor-Stuart period, while Lara Elena Donnelly’s The Amberlough Dossier series was inspired by Berlin in the Weimar-Nazi era. Historical fantasy represents a third alternative to realist historical fiction on the one hand and conventional fantasy on the other that takes place in alternate worlds with their own discrete histories (e.g. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth or George R. R. Martin’s Westeros).
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My debut novel The Melancholy of Untold History is not a work of historical fantasy as such, but the sub-genre provided me with options in exploring historical themes in fiction without having to limit my creative impulses due to concerns about distorting real history. The idea that I wanted to pursue in my work was one that I have been lecturing to my students for years. When a civilization tells stories about itself, it begins with tales of gods, monsters, and semi-divine heroes. As that civilization develops, it moves on to memorializing events in its history, celebrating great personages like kings, generals, and sages. In the modern era, interest shifts to the lives of ordinary citizens, including their inner thoughts and feelings.
I wanted to illustrate this movement from myth to history to quotidian life in a world of my own creation, but beyond that I also wanted to tell stories of fully realized characters whose humanity and complexity could only be fully explored through fiction. For that purpose, I came up with a hybrid narrative, parts of which read like mythological fantasy, others like academic history, and still others, realist literature.
So my commitment to telling the truth about the past did not result in the suppression of my creative instinct. It rather led me to find novel solutions to the dilemma I faced in wanting to exercise my imagination to the fullest while adhering to the principles of historical scholarship. Even as I realized that I could not write conventional historical fiction, my discovery of historical fantasy allowed me to imagine new ways in which I could pursue my passions as both a historian and a fiction writer at the same time.
Check out Minsoo Kang’s The Melancholy of Untold History here:
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