Aristotle Says Your Historical Novel Isn't History

By David Griffin Brown

Aristotle is famous for a lot of things, most of them having nothing to do with fiction. But hiding inside his body of work is a short book called Poetics, full of craft advice that still applies today, 2360 years later.

Here's a fun nugget: "It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen."

(When Aristotle says poet, he means storyteller. In his day that meant epic and tragedy. Today it means you and your novel.)

At a glance, this sounds like an incongruous division of labour, as if historians look backward, and storytellers look forward. But the tragedies Aristotle admired most were built on historical and legendary figures whose endings every audience member already knew. His "what may happen" is a matter of translation. A better rendering for our purposes is what may have been: how a person would plausibly speak or act, whether we're imagining next year or reconstructing a conversation from 1793. In other words, authenticity.

He goes on: "Poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."

This one is easy to misread as an argument for generalization, as if fiction shouldn’t get specific. The opposite is true. Fiction is built out of particulars: the specific gesture, the specific room, the specific thing a character says, contrary to what they mean. The difference lies in what those particulars achieve. The historian's particulars are faithful to the record. The storyteller's particulars serve the reader, selected and arranged to render patterns of human experience we recognize in ourselves. The universal is therefore revealed through well-chosen particulars.

In Defense of Getting It Right

To really wrap our heads around Aristotle’s point, we can look at historical fiction.

Let's be clear about something first: historical accuracy is critical. A big part of the genre's appeal is period reconstruction. Readers pick up historical fiction for a kind of time travel, and the fantasy only holds if the world meshes with our expectations. Get the textiles or the slang wrong, and you'll hear about it, because hist-fic readers pay attention.

Aristotle understood the credibility that comes with drawing on the real world. He noted that tragedians frequently used names and narratives from history and legend, and he explains why: "What has happened is manifestly possible: otherwise it would not have happened." A real event comes with built-in authenticity. Nobody is going to argue with the fall of a city that actually fell.

In our Story Skeleton analysis of The Name of the Rose, we noted that, with all historical fiction, the setting should be inseparable from the story it tells. Eco's theological debates and labyrinthine library aren't a fancy hat on top of the plot. They are integral to the plot. That's the standard with historical fiction in general. Research should be so fully woven into the story that the reader can't tell where the record ends and the invention begins. But also, the research shouldn’t be thrown in just because the author thought it was interesting—the particulars should serve the reader’s experience, create an expression of the universal, the human condition.

Where the Record Runs Dry

A historical archive can give you births and deaths, an occasional letter, a ledger, a photograph. It almost never gives you motive. It doesn't record what two lovers whispered to each other, what someone felt watching a ship leave the harbour, or why a person made the one stupid choice that changed their entire life. This is where the novelist's work begins. Aristotle says as much: even a poet working from real events "is none the less a poet," because those events still have to be shaped according to "the law of the probable and possible." The record tells you what happened. You are on the hook for why it happened, and the why has to be convincing—and compelling.

Aristotle gives us a nice illustration from the ancient world of portrait artists. Polygnotus painted people nobler than they were. Pauson painted them worse. Dionysius painted them true to life. All three worked from the same faces, and the difference in their finished products came down to a choice about what to highlight and what to omit. Every historical novelist stands at the same easel. Sometimes it serves the story to portray a character in a better light; sometimes they work better with a hint of villainy.

Whose Plausibility Is It, Anyway?

Every generation's "what may have been" gets filtered through what that generation is willing to read.

Sometimes we sanitize the brutality of the past. The Viking warlord is a stock figure of contemporary historical fiction: driven, charismatic, loyal to his crew, and occasionally brutal but in a way the plot justifies. The historical version took thralls as a matter of course, sold them, and thought nothing of it. Few contemporary novels will deliver that reality without softening it, because a protagonist who enslaves people for profit and gives no shits about it is not a character contemporary readers are likely to root for.

Sometimes it's not about brutality so much as which virtue survives the adaptation. Homer's Odysseus is a serial liar who tricks his way home and then hangs twelve maidservants alongside his wife’s suitors. No big deal. By 1954, Kirk Douglas' Ulysses recast the man as brave and romantic. Most recently, Christopher Nolan's version repackages Odysseus' deceptiveness as an internal conflict.

None of these is an example of historical fiction failing at accuracy. We’re back to Polygnotus choosing the nobler brushstroke. (Or the more fashionable one.) We do this to give a present-day reader something to identify with, or something to be inspired by. Every era's "what may have been" reformats the past into whatever the contemporary audience is willing to forgive or find beautiful.

The universal, whether set two years or five centuries in the past, is always triangulating humanity in the here and now. The past doesn’t change. It’s how we seek our reflection in the past that does.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling, Story Skeleton: The Classics, and Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his work has appeared in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review, White Wall Review, and Grain. He has published three novels: When the Sky Breaks, We've Come for Your Eggs, and No Country for Old Dragons. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. As an editor, he pays special attention to structure, relationship arcs, and voice. David lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Kosapsum Nations.