The English Literature Essay Competition for students of sixth-form or FE schools and colleges attracted some very strong entries. However, we decided that Ms Sabrina Siu of Headington School, Oxford, should be awarded first prize for her essay on how fiction is more 'truthful' than history. Sabrina's thoughtful and elegantly-expressed essay draws on literary texts and historical events to argue that fiction explores the interstices of history, or rather, what history leaves out. Congratulations, Sabrina! We hope that your iPad will inspire you to composition and creativity in the coming year.
Here is the
complete list of winners. The winning essay follows.
'I'm not interested in things that aren't true' (Philip Larkin). Is fiction more 'truthful' than history?
Sabrina Siu
Headington School, Oxon
To those who agree with Larkin and take more
of an interest in history, in things that are ‘true’, that begs the question –
what makes them so? Truth, as defined by Merriam-Webster, can be either ‘the
state of being the case; fact’, or ‘a judgement, proposition or idea that is
true or accepted as true’. When considering historical truth and validity, the
latter definition seems more appropriate. Historians compile evidence –
archaeological, written, oral – to recreate the historical event as closely as
possible. However, the evidence tends
to become distorted because each historian has a different interpretation of
said event, and other times there are gaps in our knowledge of the event that
transpired due to lack of evidence, until it gets to the point where we have to
ask ourselves – is historical evidence an accurate depiction of human history?
Conversely, it can be argued that fiction’s portrayal of mankind has a much
larger basis in truth than, indeed, the evidence collated by historians ever
could. To demonstrate this, I will explore the fusion of fiction and history in
Homer’s Iliad, the societal truths
reflected in An Inspector Calls and Pride and Prejudice, and finally, the
allegories in Harry Potter pertaining
to humanity’s mistakes during the 20th century.
Our main source of information regarding the
Mycenaean Period and the Trojan War comes from Homer. While it is true that
certain elements in the Iliad, such
as the involvement of the Olympian gods, are myth instead of reality, there is
extensive archaeological evidence to support the historical accuracy of at
least some things pertaining to the Mycenaean age. An example of this is the
detailed description Homer gives about armour, such as in Book 9 when Achilles
puts on the ‘beautiful greaves, fitted with silver anklets’ and slings the ‘sword
of bronze with silver scabbard’ The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy
and Mycenae in the 1870s-80s prove that these were indeed important cities
during the Bronze Age, thus lending credence to the events of the Iliad. Indeed, Homer’s epic was recorded
in a time when the vast majority of the population was illiterate, and
histories were passed down through the generations orally, and so it comes as
no surprise that the resulting product is most likely a mixture of fiction and
fact, a poem meant to record Mycenaean history, but also to glorify heroes and
convey Greek morals to the masses. For the historical truth of such ancient
civilizations, then, fiction in the form of Homer’s Iliad is perhaps a more truthful representation of the Trojan War
than what scattered evidence historians have struggled to piece together.
In fact, it is interesting to note just how
much of fiction is derived from real events, and we see this reflection of
truth clearly in J.B. Priestley’s An
Inspector Calls. Set in 1912, just before the outbreak of World War One,
Mr. Birling scoffs at the idea of there being a war at the start of the play,
stating his view that ‘The Germans don’t want war. Nobody wants war’. To the
1945 audience the play was first performed to, the words would have been
incredibly ironic and brought the truth of the matter home, because by that
point the world had been through two world wars and destruction on a global
scale, and Mr. Birling’s ignorance would have stirred up bitterness and grief
for the loved ones they had lost. Mr. Birling’s firmly capitalist views are
J.B. Priestley’s criticism of the unjust social hierarchy in the society he
lived in, and this is reflected in Birling saying ‘we can’t let these Bernard
Shaws and H.G. Wellses do all the talking’. Shaw and Wells were both
socialists, and saw the need for social change even before the outbreak of
World War One. Writing in 1945, Priestley uses Birling’s words to satirize the
ruling elite whose refusal to share power in part led to the Great War back in
1914, and afterwards the conservative middle-classes whose inability to govern
effectively led to Adolf Hitler’s dictatorial rise to power and hence, the
start of the Second World War in 1939. When considering the satiric portrayal
of Birling and the historical context the play is set in, An Inspector Calls provides us with arguably much more insight into
class distinctions in the 20th century than historians can.
Not all fiction, however, provides insight
into historical truth, and it is easy to see why Larkin was so dismissive of
anything less than concrete evidence. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a prime example of historical negligence.
Although it is set during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, the novel is
surprisingly bare of any mention of the war effort, revolving instead around
the social lives of middle to upper-class women in Regency England, with the
militia hovering in the periphery, a barely-felt presence at such a time of
conflict between the two countries. Indeed, the military officers in the novel
– such as Wickham – are always seen engaging in social situations, and their
primary narrative function is to be objects of desire for characters like Lydia
and Kitty Bennet, without any mention as to why the regiment is stationed in
Meryton for so much of the story, as such undermining the historical context of
the novel. However, it would be unfair to say Pride and Prejudice doesn’t provide an accurate representation of
Regency England, since Austen does convey her distaste of the class prejudice
inherent in society through her satiric portrayal of the characters of Darcy,
Collins, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Darcy’s pride in his aristocratic
lineage, and prejudice towards the middle-classes, is made apparent in his
first proposal to Elizabeth, when he lingers on the “inferiority” of her
connections, and of how they are a “degradation” to him. Lady Catherine’s
snobbish disdain of the lower classes is shown when she bemoans that “the
shades of Pemberley” will be “polluted” if Elizabeth does end up marrying
Darcy. Through her characterization of these arrogant characters, Austen
satirizes the class-consciousness that permeated Regency England, thus proving
how fiction reveals the truth even in a novel so lacking in historical fact.
The same can be said for contemporary literature,
most notably, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter series. Voldemort is the power-hungry dictator who will stop at
nothing in his pursuit of power and ruthless purging of Muggleborns from the
wizarding world, and through his character, Rowling allegorizes Adolf Hitler’s
reign of terror in Nazi Germany during the 1930s-40s. Much like Voldemort,
Hitler sought racial purification, and to accomplish this he spearheaded the
resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany by blaming their defeat in the Great War
on the Jews. The Death Eaters who help Voldemort capture and torture Muggles,
then, are allegories to the Nazi Party’s Gestapo, or secret police. Both groups
assist their respective autocrats in what they see as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of
the state, indoctrinating the public and instilling in them, as Arthur Weasley
puts it, “everyone’s worse fear … the very worst”. Similarly, the Second
Wizarding War of 1995-98 offers a parallel to the Second World War, which
occurred as a result of Hitler’s relentless persecution of the Jews, and other
countries’ concern over Hitler’s indiscriminate conquering of territories such
as Czechoslovakia. In the final three novels of the series, Rowling uses the
purebloods’ discrimination of Muggleborns, and the deaths of beloved
characters, to draw attention to the injustice and futility of both Hitler’s
anti-Semitic movement and the Second World War, proving once again how
historical truth is revealed through fiction.
To conclude, fiction reveals more of
the truth than history ever could, because the unreliability of historical
evidence after accounting for bias, and the fact that history was not properly
documented for the first few millennia of human civilisation, deeply undermine
the utility of historical fact in providing a truthful narrative of mankind’s
history. Furthermore, the discrepancy between two sources pertaining to the
same event often leaves modern contemporaries at a loss as to which version
better depicts the truth. In this sense, therefore, it is only logical for us
to turn to fiction to pick out the truth of our history, a truth which Homer, Priestley,
Austen and Rowling have so beautifully woven into the fabric of their works.
References:
The Iliad – Homer (Robert Fitzgerald
translation, Oxford University Press 1998)
An Inspector Calls – J.B. Priestley (Heinemann Plays,
Pearson United 1993)
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (Penguin Classics 2003)
The Harry
Potter series – J.K. Rowling (Bloomsbury 1997)
Copyright Sabrina Siu 2015