Here lies part three of my series on Andersonville, genealogy, reading, and remembering.

Historically-minded readers may balk at the notion of turning to fiction to try to gain access to historical truth. They may particularly balk at the notion that this might be a good thing to do when the facts are too few to produce a viable, verifiable account. I myself balk at those notions, despite, or perhaps because of, my genuine love for historical fiction. But abstract methodological balking didn't stop me from approaching Andersonville with the frank intention of using the novel to try to grasp what being an Andersonville prisoner might "really" have been like for David Sells. I knew that, from a "scholarly" perspective, I was doing bad history, not to mention illegitimate literary analysis. But I didn't particularly care, and I went ahead and went looking for David Sells in Kantor's novel anyhow. It was a good thing I did.

No matter how much documented information you have, you can't ever fully or definitely recreate--accurately, affectively--the feel of the past. But you can try, and this is what MacKinlay Kantor did with his novel. A lifelong Civil War buff who grew up surrounded by the stories of that conflict's aging veterans, Kantor read toward Andersonville for forty years, and wrote it for twenty-five. Andersonville wasn't Kantor's only work and it was not his first work, but it was his great synthesis, the result of a lifetime spent not only studying the Civil War and the Andersonville camp, but making the tremendous effort to imagine them.

Studying and imagining are two different things, though they do overlap at points, and Kantor's novel illustrates this beautifully. Kantor could conceivably have attempted a Shelby Foote-like historical opus. His research had prepared him to undertake such a project. But he did not. His decision to do his historical synthesis from within the framework of fiction was not an accident but a choice--one well worth careful consideration (worth noting, too, but beyond the scope of this post: Foote's writing about the Civil War began as fiction; the massive multi-volume history for which he is best known grew out of his creative writing, and was begun at almost precisely the moment that Kantor published Andersonville).

As a genre, historical fiction operates under the assumption that history, and especially history's intangibles (the moral how of things, the affective tone of things, the subjective feel of things), can be, and perhaps had better be, handled through openly creative, if responsibly researched, narrative. This idea informed Walter Scott when he wrote Waverley, an early nineteenth-century tale about the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion that is generally credited with being the first historical novel. Enormously popular and influential throughout the nineteenth century, Scott had much to do with shaping the emerging genre of historical fiction both in Britain and abroad--if Dickens and George Eliot were each inspired, in their different ways, to write historical novels after the tradition of Scott, so were Balzac, Hugo, and Tolstoy.

The sort of influence Scott had on authors and readers was necessarily much deeper than a discussion of mere literary influence can indicate, though. Certainly he shaped aesthetic expectations about fiction; Scott's decision to meld historical thinking with storytelling was one of the most important moments in the notoriously troubled novel's acquisition of respectability as a literary genre. But in creating a public taste for historical narrative, Scott was also making it possible for people to live their lives as if they were themselves characters in historical novels. Mark Twain, for example, once wrote that the Civil War owed much to Southerners' collective effort to shape their society after Scott's fiction:

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made those gentlemen value their bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.

Scott wanted people to remember a complicated and decisive moment in Scottish history that was, half a century later, quickly fading from collective memory even as it continued to define its descendants. Likewise Eliot (Middlemarch contemplates the period of England's First Reform Bill, forty years before), Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities uses the French Revolution as a means of reflecting on whether revolution would come to Victorian England), Tolstoy (War and Peace places the Russian aristocracy against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars), and MacKinlay Kantor, who very much belongs in this distinguished company. All believed that the way to get at something like an understanding of the pivotal moments of the past was to recognize that those moments both create and are created by those who lived them. As Tolstoy puts it in War and Peace,

In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

to be continued

The Twain quote is nice and all, but Alan Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee does a much better job explaining the disjuncture between North and South. Indeed, it is the difference between King Phillip's War and Bacon's rebellion if we want to get deep into the past on this. Scott may have named the phenomenon but it was all there before Scott was read in the US. See especially, The Origins of Southern Radicalism in which Lacy Ford argues that South Carolina's secession was driven by "the country-republican ideal of personal independence."