In defence of historical RPF (real person fiction)

Guy Gavriel Kay speaks out against writing historical RPF.

I actually saw him give this talk several months ago at ICFA, and I meant to make a post about it, so this saves me having to reconstruct his argument from memory and then argue against it. I partially resent his kids-these-days rhetoric:

What is at work today is linked to a general erosion of the ethical value of privacy and a parallel emergence of a widespread sense of entitlement to look at – or to make use of – the lives of others.

Yes, yes, and children don't listen to their elders, and the Greeks are clogging up the Tiber. For God's sake, speculative biography is hardly a new genre. And yes, no doubt the internet and reality TV have changed the way we think about the individual, but he talks as though Facebook and Twitter and Myspace were only ways of looking at others, rather than ways of constructing oneself as a textual being in a new arena of communication. He fails to understand that people consciously make textual simulacra of themselves on these sites - they don't open up windows to their souls, even if they think they're doing that. They are not victims of technology. They join these sites, they volunteer what personal information they like, and they allow who they wish to see it. People use reality TV shows - with varying degrees of expertness, true - as ways to further their careers, and build their public image in a certain way, just as Ovid circulated his poems and Augustus his statues. This is an age of mass autobiography, not of the erosion of the privacy of the individual.

I also dislike his pretensions in claiming to be striking a blow for ETHICS in his books, when a nasty part of me wants to note that changing the names of the (very recognisable) characters in your historical fiction to make it fantasy is a nice dodge for avoiding the other annoyances of writing historical fiction, like research*, or (as he himself notes) avoiding offending people with your portrayal of national icons (especially as, with the life of El Cid, it's the national icon of a culture not his own). And I dislike that he's using his own books as a platform to trumpet his views about a modern phenomenon which I really don't think is comparable to writing books about the emperor Justinian and changing the names, actually.

*Although I should note that by all accounts, he does a lot of research, and I do enjoy his books.

My personal reactions aside, it's an interesting point he's raising, but I think the thing is that he has pulled together long-dead historical figures and people who have died within living memory as being ontologically the same. He writes about long-dead historical figures, and claims to be defending them by changing the names, but note that he doesn't protest against Mary Renault's Alexander books, or the TV series Rome, or I, Claudius - possibly because the latter is a rewrite of Tacitus, which might explode Kay's claim that the world has started falling since Facebook. He claims that Justinian and Eleanor of Aquitaine and El Cid are the same as people like Wittgenstein and Marilyn Monroe, people who are still remembered as real people by others who are alive today, who have living relatives. But, realistically, Monroe and Wittgenstein are dead; speculation on what they thought and how they acted is not going to hurt them, unless you believe in an aware afterlife, which isn't under discussion here. But it's true that fiction written about the recently-dead claiming to 'know' their real selves (if anyone really does that) has the potential to hurt the living who loved them and remember them. Whether or not writers should be allowed to do that is a different issue.

But for people who don't exist in any way now except in text - and history is text - what's the difference between writing stories about them, and fanfiction? I've long been fascinated by the way RPF and RPS, fanfiction about 'real people' (boybands, actors, even politicians), reads the public constructs of stars - their publicity photos, their interviews, their twitters - as texts to be plundered and expanded upon. Fandom knows, as Kay doesn't, that when people carry themselves a certain way in the public eye, when they tell their friends, subjects and biographers about themselves, when they have statues placed of themselves in the forum and write lawcodes, they're writing stories about themselves. And authors writing stories based in those pre-existing worlds, about those pre-created characters, is fanfiction. Perhaps he's against fanfiction too, I don't know. But the interesting thing about Kay's argument is that he puts his finger on where fanfiction and historical RPF and history start to blur into each other - if you take his argument to its logical conclusion, you also start to argue that it's unethical to write history about historical figures, because we can't claim to understand their motivations, and shouldn't try.

But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

When Peter Brown wrote his biography of St. Augustine, was he doing with him as he would? Perhaps historians should acknowledge their educated guesswork, invention and fantasy more clearly. That's a serious point, but again, I think Kay is being facetious in his conflation of the textual construct of a person with the real person. A book does not manipulate a person's physical being; it may alter and taint others' memories of them, but that's something different, and he has not made that distinction.

I also notice that Kay only cites major historical figures - El Cid, J Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, Wittgenstein. These are (even if you forget the enormous historical gap and the difference in the nature of the sources we have for these figures, as Kay seems to want to do) all people with voices. They can speak for themselves - people can go back and read what they wrote, or read reports about what they did and said. Writing stories about them doesn't change that. If Kay is really concerned about the invasion of privacy of people of the past, why doesn't he talk about the historical novels about people without speaking parts in history? What about Bagoas the eunuch, or Pullo and Vorenus, or the girl with the pearl earring? Kunta Kinte?

The Wikipedia article on 'Roots' sets the book/series' lack of historical truth against its social impact in modern America, and quotes Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination."

There are ways of doing history that involve more leaps of the imagination than others, and they end up on the fiction shelves, but I don't think they're any less valuable. Perhaps it is entitlement to think one can write the story of a person who lived centuries ago, worked as a cleaner or a prostitute or a common soldier, and died; but there's a value in it, too. If we're talking about respect for the dead, isn't that a fitting memorial? If we're talking about the value of these stories for the living, isn't it important to help people find a way into history through ordinary lives that remind us that there were real people in the past? That the history of western Europe isn't a sea of dead white men?

It's also worth noting that on the social networking sites that Kay dislikes so much, people who haven't had voices in the past, who haven't been able to write their own biographies, are doing so. Sure, it's threatening to suddenly be faced with people claiming the right to write their own stories, when previously the subgroups of the silent majority could be written about with impunity. And it should make us think twice about what, exactly, we're doing when we write other people's stories for them and claim their authority. But Kay's problem seems to be based on the belief that to write the history of a long, long-dead person is to affect them in some fundamental way; to do something to them. But those long-dead people he's talking about, all of whom left writings or writings about themselves, they were all intelligent, powerful people who manipulated their own press, maybe with more skill than people on Facebook, but it's basically the same. They knew what they were doing. We don't have access to their real selves, but only the stories they wrote about themselves. I'm a fan and a historian, and I don't see any problem with writing stories about their stories. I do see problems with writing stories about people who are alive today, or who just died and whose families are alive, or who are national icons and are important to people, but those are for other reasons, and Kay doesn't mention those things as part of his argument.

The questions I think we should be asking aren't whether it's the same thing to write a story about Julius Caesar or Princess Diana. I think it's fairly clear that it isn't. What we should be asking is, to what extent is academic history different from historical RPF? If we changed the names and added an extra moon in the sky as Kay does, would it be fantasy, and if so, should we acknowledge that? Is it morally right to write the stories of long-dead people who didn't get the chance to write their own? Is it morally right to not?