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For a long time I have been thinking about the possibility or impossibility of using fiction to narrate historical eventsThat is, whether there can be any form of truth in that approach other than what the work reflects about the author’s opinions and ideological biases.
It is not that I believe that literature and art, in approaching the collective past, are obliged to be faithful to historical facts. I would be in a very bad position to demand that duty after having written years ago. a crazy novel about the Spanish civil warin which Ortega y Gasset dissolves into thin air like a ghost and General Cabanellas travels around Spain disguised as a beggar. Perhaps one of the best-known scenes where a work, in this case a film, contradicts historical truth is that of Inglourious Basterdsin which an American commando mows down Hitler and a host of Nazi bigwigs inside a theatre. It is permissible to have fun imagining what did not happen in reality, to turn art into a game that does not pretend to reproduce the truth of the facts, and also to skip the overrated obligation of verisimilitude.
But there are works that use the tools of fiction in order to reflect, narrate, interpret historical situations or approach characters who at some point played a role in political or cultural events. Several of these books have recently fallen into my hands: I am Milena from Pragueof Monika Zgustovaaims to expand the image we have of that woman who for most people only exists in Kafka’s letters; The man who loved dogsof Leonardo Paduraalternates scenes from the life of Trotsky and his assassin Ramón Mercader; Anna Bantyin Artemisiawanted to get into the consciousness of Artemisia Gentileschi and her situation as a woman artist in 17th century Italy; and in my own house it has been written Maddi and the bordersof Edurne Portelawhich attempts to imagine the life of a woman active in smuggling and in transporting persecuted Nazis across the border that divides the Basque Country.
It is clear that there is an exhaustive work of documentation and research behind these four novels. And it is also clear that each one comes across gaps that have to be filled. Padura, in an afterword, stresses that he wanted to be faithful to the documented facts, but that in Mercader’s case they were very few. However, he appears in a considerable number of scenes, and he does so, writes Padura, “in accordance with the freedoms and demands of fiction”The authors of the other three novels mentioned use the first person, that is, Artemisia, Maddi and Milena express what they do, think and feel, although, of course, there is no record of many of these activities, especially when they take place in the intimate sphere. Thus, they also have to resort to filling in the silences of the past.
What are the liberties and demands faced by someone who writes a novel “based on real events”? Is everything permitted, because, after all, we do not have to believe what a fiction tells us? I am sure that at least the three authors mentioned consider that through their work they are approaching some form of truth. Their novels are not only or even primarily entertainment.
I confess that I am irritated by novels and films that use history as an attractive context for drama, suspense, or romantic passion, especially when the events are recent and still have repercussions on the present. An example: the movie irritated me The secret of their eyeswhich, although with invented characters, used the brutality of the Argentine dictatorship to end up telling a love story. I have always been embarrassed that the incident weighs more than the context, instead of illuminating it.
That’s why I’m usually interested in fictions that tend to imagine and not invent. To put it another way: inventing would consist of creating scenes that we have no record of or that happened but we don’t know what specifically happened in them, in order to achieve objectives such as: create suspense, design an interesting character, generate tension, add a love story… It is invented, then, because it suits the author, not to delve deeper into the past.
Imagination would consist of approaching these situations with the desire to, from what we know, deduce or intuit what we do not know. The aim is to understand, not to entertain or capture.
We may wonder whether there is an ethical difference between the two positions – assuming that we consider that there is room for ethics in literature – or whether it is only a methodological difference, which influences the type of book resulting from our choice. Put another way: Is it more honest to put literature at the service of History than to put History at the service of literature? In art there are no rules and everyone can do what they want. But imagination is a form of knowledge and using it to reveal reality seems to me a beautiful task. If fiction aims to illuminate History, it will not achieve this by inventing it at its convenience, but by taking advantage of its poetic, expressive and constructive force to reach where the informative language of a historical treatise does not.
