Perhaps it’s my early training as a New Critic, or perhaps it’s just old age; but I don’t think the present media stir over the accuracy of Spielberg’s Lincoln is very sophisticated. Part of the stir, the nitpicking about details, is critically naïve. A good index of the potential nitpicking and the naïveté as well may be found in Harold Holzer’s commentary in The Daily Beast. Holzer served as a consultant for the film and was briefly worried that he might be held accountable for some of the film’s “bloopers.”
Inaccurate portrayals of history are at least as old as Shakespeare. Of the bard’s transgressions of history one might mention two in particular that stand out for their hyperbolic misrepresentation: Richard III and Shylock, the one referable to Tudor politics and the other to the history of anti-Semitism. Shakespeare’s Richard III is not a mere distortion of the historical Richard; it is a straw person fabricated (perhaps) to please a Queen descended from the usurping Henry VII, whom Shakespeare represents as a stock hero. But Shakespeare’s Richard transcends the official villain of Tudor historiography. He is, as Harold Bloom puts it, “a great monster, but one that will be refined into Shakespeare’s invention of the human, of which Iago, to everyone’s delight and sorrow, will constitute so central a part.”1
Bloom is unable to give Shylock such a blessing. “[I]t would have been better for the last four centuries of the Jewish People had Shakespeare never written this play,”2 he admits ruefully and notes that there is likely no way that The Merchant of Venice can now be performed that is faithful to Shakespeare’s apparent intention. But Shylock, himself, so transcends the limits of the cultural and artistic history that surround his creation that we see the whole spectacle of anti-Semitic persecution in his humiliation, as Bloom does. We may have to relegate The Merchant of Venice to the same corner of cultural history to which we relegate Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, but to deny Shylock and his persecutors’ presence in and relevance to the human, to us as we are, may be to deny the existence of sin.
Spielberg’s Lincoln and the characters who surround him in Spielberg’s film are no less fictions than the characters of Shakespeare’s history plays. The comparison is useful because these plays stand near the beginning of modern thinking about historiography and suggest at least two standards of judgment with respect to historical fictions generally. 1) Do we refer questions of authenticity to the surface details of our knowledge of the past; indeed, is our knowledge something like the sum of such details? And, 2) do we refer questions of authenticity to what we think we know about historical causation? What place in our thinking should be occupied by modern demythologizing and deconstruction? As Tim Burke has put it, in a piece with which I more or less agree, part of the argument is “just one more front in the long struggle between social history and narrative”: that is, whether we can legitimately claim that heroic individuals have power to shape the large movements of history or even to be major participants in them.
But historical fictions are not history in any academic sense I understand. They are rather meditations on a past which perhaps never was but which becomes usable as it is reenacted. It is in the nature of such meditations to focus on heroic individuals: saviors (however flawed), princes (as in the long mirror tradition), great villains (some comic some not), etc. And, for the same reasons, such meditations are inevitably selective, partial, contingent. Focus on the collective. on the mass, gives us the less than interesting productions of Soviet realism or at best, the novels of Farrell and Dos Passos which engage us today, I think, primarily through their focus on individual characters. If the immediate object of poetry is pleasure, not truth, as Coleridge thought, the immediate object of historical fiction (after pleasure of course) is usability. And in such usability there is a kind of truth, to some present need to imagine a past of a certain kind.
Such fictions may inspire us, as Richard Rorty says they do and should,3 or they may stimulate critical thinking. But our critical thinking is misplaced if it stops at the perception that, for instance, William Slade is (perhaps) misrepresented in Spielberg’s Lincoln, along with other African American characters who are presented as passive and subservient. We should ask, in addition, why we are moved as citizens of twenty-first century America to make such a claim. Is this claim (made by Kate Masur in the review I cited in my last post) coherent on its face? Is it self-evident? Or does it too proceed from historical and intellectual antecedents that could be examined?4
As participants in a historical fiction (and for my purposes it is convenient to blur the distinction between attendings to narrative and to drama) we are more like communicants at a religious celebration than readers of history. We are not mere spectators but reenactors ourselves. We are scripted, but whether we immerse ourselves in the script or participate with critical detachment, we do not escape invention. Bloom calls such practice the invention of the human, and argues that Shakespeare is chief among practitioners of such an art—but we all practice it. As Ishmael says, “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.”
Notes
1Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, New York: 1998, 73.
2Ibid., 190.
3Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country, Cambridge, MA: 1998.
4At the beginning of her review, Masur avers, “As a historian who watched the film on Saturday night in Chicago, I was not surprised to find that Mr. Spielberg took liberties with the historical record. As in ‘Schindler’s List’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ his purpose is more to entertain and inspire than to educate.” I have trouble with this statement, particularly with its reference to “the historical record,” as though there were such a univocal thing. The statement also ties Masur to what Bloom calls the “School of Resentment,” which substitutes resentment of past failures (or present ones as in this case) for social hope. See Rorty, op. cit., 126.