A Tale of Three Genres: History, Fiction, and the Historical Detektiv

A Tale of Three GenresHistory, Fiction, and the Historical Detektiv Alfred J. Rieber (bio) “True history began with Sir Walter Scott,” A. J. P. Taylor wrote, provocatively (as always).1 Undeniably, Scott had an enormous influence on historians: Thomas Babington Macaulay for one, Thomas Carlyle for another. Macaulay’s admiration fixed on Scott’s style of narration, which Macaulay applied in his own work with almost indiscriminate vigor. His romantic excess earned him the contempt of latter-day historiographers like G. P. Gooch, who quipped: “Truth bartered for the telling phrase.”2 Yet according to Carlyle, Scott taught him to look upon the past as peopled by living men, “not abstractions … not diagrams and theorems; [a rebuke to the men of the Enlightenment] but men in buff coats and breeches, with color in their cheeks, with passion in their stomachs and the idioms, features, and vitalities of very men.”3 This was the stuff of social history. Across the Atlantic, Scott was, according to Peter Novick, “the most popular and imitated author in the early nineteenth century.” George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, and other amateur “literary historians” drew inspiration from Scott’s florid style, style in the sense given by art historians and anthropologists as “a vehicle of expression within the group, communicating and fixing certain values.”4 In Russia, Scott also enjoyed a popular vogue. The similarity of his historical approach to that employed by Nikolai Karamzin in his monumental [End Page 353] 12-volume history has often been commented on, although there is no direct evidence of his influence. As for Pushkin’s writing in a historical vein, the relationship is well established if complex.5 It should be recalled that both Karamzin and Pushkin approached the writing of history as poets. Karamzin perceived this as a double advantage: history provided dramatic incidents the poet could exploit, and there was poetic charm in what was remote in time.6 No doubt these were among the reasons Pushkin relied on Karamzin’s work for his historical detail and defended him against his critics. But Pushkin was searching for the appropriate genre in which he could best work through his historical imagination: the drama (Boris Godunov, 1824–25), the historical novel (the unfinished Arab of Peter the Great, 1827), the romantic poem (Poltava, 1828–29), the historical poem (The Bronze Horseman, 1833), the historical monograph (History of the Pugachev Rebellion, 1834) and again, after the eruption of Scott’s novels on the Russian scene, the historical novel (The Captain’s Daughter, 1836). In each of these genres Pushkin found different possibilities for combining dramatic, lyrical, romantic, and historical elements. That he ended up with the historical novel reflects, in the view of Jurij Striedter, his appreciation through reading Scott of an emerging new historical consciousness. This was, in his view, the best way to solve the problem of how to retain a sense of historical distance and yet narrate events as a story.7 His multiple experiments in genre gave inspiration to Russian writers (although not historians) like Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, who invented new genres that departed from the novel as it was evolving in West European literature.8 Undeniably influenced by Scott, did these writers of history and their spiritual descendants err in crossing the line between fact and fiction? David Hackett Fischer thinks so. In his lengthy list of historical fallacies, he defines the “aesthetic fallacy” by making oblique reference to Scott as one who “subordinated historical precision to the demands of character and plot.” [End Page 354] Hackett seals the verdict by invoking Virginia Woolf’s stern but in his view “sound maxim” that “truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible.”9 But are they? The most notable recent theoretical attempt to close the gap, although not one greeted enthusiastically by many historians, was Hayden White’s Metahistory. White argued that the deep structural content of history, at least in the 19th century, was “generally poetic, and specifically linguistic”; its narrative was emplotted and its explanatory argumentation imitated literary conventions. Although White does not mention Scott, his treatment of Carlyle may serve as a surrogate. He extracts from Carlyle a notion of...