"Truth is the daughter of time"

[Peter Giordano]

I'd been thinking about Andrew's comments regarding history and
fiction and decided to look at some novels which use history - The
first one I came across was Josephine Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME
(about a 20th century detective who tries to solve a 15th century
crime) -The title of the novel refers to what is described as "An old
proverb: Truth is the daughter of time." - Just as my understanding of
Wittgenstein may be fuzzy my understanding of the proverb is shadowy
but the phrase somehow resonnates for me

So there are some novelists who use fiction to tell history - THE
KILLER ANGELS - THE DEATH OF THE FOX - There are some novelists who use
history to make fiction - Michael Ondaatje's IN THE SKIN OF A LION and
its sequel THE ENGLISH PATIENT - Then there are those novelists, like
Pynchon, and maybe even like Paul DiFillipo who use history to make
something else entirely - The example I'll use is one I referred to
before - A poem by Richard Wilbur:

THE FOURTH OF JULY

1.
Liddell, the Oxford lexicographer, 
Allowed his three small daughters on this day
To row from Folly Bridge to Godstow, where
Their oarsman, Mr. Dodgson, gave them tea
Beneath a rick of hay,
Shading their minds with golden fantasy.
And it was all fool's gold,
Croquet or caucus madder than a hare,
That universe of which he sipped and told,
MOcking all grammars, codes, and theorems
Beside the spangled, blindly flowing Thames.

2.
Off to the west, in Memphis, where the sun's
Mid-morning fire beat on a wider stream, 
His purpose headstrong as a river runs,
Grant closed a smoky door on aides and guards
And chewed through scheme on scheme
For toppling Vicksburg like a house of cards.
The haze at last would clear
On Hard Times Landing, Porter's wallowed guns,
The circling trenches that in just a year
Brought the starved rebels through the settling smoke
To ask for terms beside a stunted oak.

3.
The sun is not a concept but a star.
What if its rays were once conjointly blurred
By tea-fumes and a general's cigar?
Though, as for that, what grand arcanum saves
Appearances, what word
Holds all from foundering in points and waves?
No doubt the fairest game
Play only in those groves where creatures are
At one, distinct, and innocent of name,
As Alice found, who in the termless wood
Lacked words to than the shade in which she stood.

4.
Nevertheless, no kindly swoon befell
Tree-named Linnaeus when the bald unknown
Encroached upon his memory, cell by cell,
ANd he, whose love of all things made had brought
Bird, beast, fish, plant, and stone
Into the reaches of his branchy thought,
Lost bitterly to mind
Their names' sweet Latin and his own as well.
Praise to all fire-fledged knowledge of the kind
That, stooped beneath a hospitable roof,
Brings only hunch and gaiety for proof,

5.
But also Copernicus, who when
His vision leapt into the solar disc
And set the earth to wheeling, waited then
To see what slate or quadrant might exact,
Not hesitant to risk
His dream-stuff in the fitting-rooms of fact;
And honor to these States,
Which come to see that black men too are men,
Beginning, after troubled sleep, debates, 
Great bloodshed, and a century's delay,
To mean what once we said upon this day.


Peter Giordano
Williams College
Williamstown, MA