History vs Fiction

[Joseph Tracy]

Isn't the attempt to record History  a perfect  example of how verifiable facts can lie. I grew up knowing many accurate facts about the life and world transforming adventures of Christopher Columbus. I read and heard  detailed information, quotes from his logs, etc. From these facts an elaborate picture was shaped by professional historians ,graduates of Harvard , Yale, Oxford, shaped by a process of authentication and peer review. Nonetheless  the picture was fundamentally a lie because a large body of information embarrassing to Columbus role as a hero of European history and  as bridge to the New World never entered the record in a signifigant public way until Howard Zinn wrote a People's History of the United States, basing most of what he wrote on Columbus' s own  readily available journals .  
I am not saying that the attempt to write good History is the same as the attempt to write good fiction. The rules should be different. But I think the urge to write history  is very often the same as the urge to write fiction, a desire to artfully edit and control reality to feed one's mythopoeic , cultural and personal dispositions.  The rules should be different , and if they were, historians who passed on the Columbus myth unchallenged before Zinn should have been questioned about their academic credentials. In fact the waters of academia were troubled and remain so to this day,  but the myth was defended with enough success  to remain in many history texts and is probably the most commonly held view of Columbus  in the United States . 

The intercourse between between the idea and reality of history  and the idea and reality of Fiction is as unstoppable as the exchanges of sexuality , music, molecules, breath, and the border lines as distinct and blurred. 
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at earthlink.net
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
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