History vs Fiction

[kent mueller]

I agree one hundred percent, and I think history as written was never
seriously questioned or debated until the last 30 or so years; whatever
formal or informal official view was presented, it was accepted pretty much
without question.  Zinn certainly has a role in that change, and I was
reading that text not long ago.  But the Columbus example caught my eye; my
wife and I visited Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, about ten years ago,
and one of the prime sites in the old colonial town is Columbus's Well, this
was a hole in the ground about 12 or 15 feet wide, with a circle of stone
wall around it maybe 2.5 feet high.  It dated from the early 1500s, and was
originally used by the Governor of Hispanola, C. Colon's brother, as a place
to plunge recalcitrant natives to their deaths, through injury or
starvation.  It now has a huge iron grate over it.

At the time we visited Columbus's Well, the bottom was lined with fast food
garbage from the nearby Wendy's.

Non-fiction is almost all I read these days, and the more books I collect on
a given subject, the more versions of history I have to wade through.  But
there are some great examples out there of history books which plumb the
basic sources (mostly contemporary newspaper accounts), such as Jean Luc
Sante's Low Life.  It shows that many of the social problems we face have
been with the Republic since its founding; drugs, gangs, prostitution,
gambling, slums -- all there throughout the 19th century in New York, and by
the end of that century in cities and towns throughout the Republic.

Kent Mueller

Visit KM art's web site at http://www.execpc.com/~artkm/

From: "Joseph Tracy" <brook7 at earthlink.net>
Reply-To: brook7 at earthlink.net
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 22:13:09 -0400
To: "pynchon-l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: History vs Fiction



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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