Essay: How History Affects Fiction by Victoria Mixon
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.–Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“Surely, my dear, you must have heard the expression meaning that something is not a true picture, or has it quite died out nowadays? ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’.” –Agatha Christie, “Strange Jest”
Christie’s indubitable Miss Marple solves the mystery of the “Strange Jest” by knowing more than one antiquated saying. The other is “gammon and spinach” which, according to her, means “nonsense”. There is no way that a reader unfamiliar with these terms could draw the conclusions that she draws, that the recipe for ham and spinach is a nonsense recipe, that the dying man who tapped his eye and left behind love letters from Betty Martin was pulling someone’s leg.
Like Dickens, whose Tale of Two Cities chronicles the fall of the French monarchy, without history Christie would have had blessed little to go on.
At first glance, though, it seems that history has blessed little to do with fiction. Fiction is pretend. History is real. Fiction is entertainment. History is inevitable. Fiction falls from the fingers of its author, willy-nilly, without interference from outside source.
History is the outside source.
If you were Samuel Beckett, you could claim to write in a historical vacuum. Poor Estragon and Vladimir wait and wait for Godot, completely cut off from the world around them. It seems they could be a couple of everymen from any land, in any human epoch.
And yet you’d be lying. Waiting for Godot clearly owes homage to King Lear and just as clearly influenced Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. History moves on, reflected in the parade of literature, from corrupt Elizabethan politics to the ennui of post-WWII shellshock to the absurdity of anti-establishment psychedelia. In every era, the little guy faces down the powers that be. In every era, the little guy’s expectation of failure or success — the expectation of the manner of failure or success — alters.
We are the children of our times. I was born in the 1960s, when dingaling hair-sprayed go-go girls dancing in cages could exist alongside hippies in rags staging love-ins against war. I grew up in the 1970s, amid the cacophony of disco and fear of OPEC. I was a young adult in the 1980s, when Reagan’s Trickle-Down Economics brought us the homeless and the adult children of ’60s radicals brought political activism into mainstream American culture.
There’s always a little guy. There are always the powers that be.
And through this we find our fiction, the imaginary universes that writers dream up, where average flesh-and-blood characters grapple with the mocking forces of fate — sometimes gaining ground, sometimes losing it, sometimes on top of the wheel of cosmic fortune, sometimes dragging through the muck and slime at the bottom. They put on their go-go boots and spray their beehives and march out there to contend with life to the best of their abilities. Will they fail? Of course they will. Life is infinitely bigger, stronger, smarter, and better equipped than a dippy dancer with hair-spray. Life is going to kick their butt.
Do we want to hear about it? Of course we do. That’s us in the go-go boots. That’s us carting around those towering beehives. We long to be righteous, ethical, innocent, and courageous. Our hearts yearn for meaning. At the same time we desperately need to be accepted. If everyone we knew were wearing shoes built inches up from the ground and blindingly-bright rayon shirts and leaping around a lit-up plastic floor posing momentarily and staring gloomily straight ahead and flinging our arms from one compass point to another as though guiding an airplane into the hanger — we’d do it too.
Don’t you know how to do the Funky Chicken? Don’t you know how to Hustle?
So do fictional characters. They know all about living heartfelt among the debris of the ridiculous. That’s what history does to human beings.
Write it down, testify to the real history of the human race. We will always remember.
About Victoria Mixon:
Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor who has worked in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, Prentice Hall, 1996, and has published pieces in various literary magazines. She freelances as an editor for fiction authors and writes articles on the art of fiction at www.victoriamixon.com.
Rebeca Schiller is the editor of Alvah's Books. She reviews literary fiction and non-fiction.