In The Allure of the Archives, Arlette Farge wonders “[h]ow to explain—without seeming to brag and without disdain for historical fiction—that if we are to do right by these many forgotten lives” whose traces end up in the archives, “we can only do so through the writing of history? […] If [they are] to ‘come alive,’ it will not be through a fable […].” (74) The choice of the word “fable” would seem to indicate that Farge has not entirely succeeded in avoiding disdain for historical fiction. I am reading the book in its English translation, of course; the word in the original French, while it might still be fable, could have different shades of meaning in that language than it does in English, where it tends to evoke Aesop-style moralizing contrivances of stories. One does think of the word “contrived” when Farge likens a novelist to a puppeteer, saying, that a novel is fiction “is true whether or not the backdrop is ‘historical’ or the characters were plucked from past centuries. It’s true that a writer can make marionettes out of eighteenth-century men and women […]. But this has nothing to do with ‘writing history.’” (74) Witness the scare quotes around the word “historical,” the notion of characters being taken out of their proper context, and the image of fictional characters being as obviously unlike real historical figures as wooden marionettes are unlike real people. It seems clear that Farge regards her own profession as historian as the more noble one, compared with the profession of fiction writing.

Historical fiction and written history are not the same thing, and it is right that each should be clearly labeled as what it is. We cannot learn from history if our history is inaccurate. Readers are rightly indignant when a memoir or nonfiction book is revealed to be a partial or complete fabrication, even if the fabrication is entirely plausible: we do like to think we have some grip on consensual reality. I believe, though, that historical fiction has its place in a broad view of the teaching of history. Start with reading a historical novel; follow that up with true history (of the kind that Farge writes). Compare and contrast. The novel can be likened to a finished painting, the historical account to the original sketch beneath it, as revealed through an x-ray. Real history, with all its gaps, can be more memorable when it is presented as a counterpoint to smoothed-over, fleshed out fictionalized history.

I dwell on this because my visit to an archive focused on research for a historical novel I am planning. Reading Farge’s book, I mulled over the differences between my archival research process and hers. Part of research for historical fiction seems (I say “seems”; this is the first historical fiction project I have undertaken) to involve simple fact-checking—could this character actually have been buried in that cemetery if she died in that year?—and part of it seems to be much more scattershot, especially in the early stages of planning and plotting: searching not just for facts but for interesting images and language. I’m eager to read more about archival research as it relates to art-making (creative writing, visual art, etc.).

My visit to the Massachusetts State Archives was an easy one: staff were friendly and readily explained the archive’s policies and the expected behavior from “researchers.” (It was, I felt, something of an honor to be given the status of “researcher.” Not being a historian myself, I don’t usually think of myself as a researcher; nevertheless, there the word is on the registration form, and there is the “R” on my new laminated badge.) The Reference Supervisor/Archivist was exceedingly patient and helpful. This is a very different environment from the forbidding, in-club archives in which Farge sets her scenes.

The materials I examined were: photographs of gravestones in the “lost towns” of the Swift River Valley prior to their flooding, with a focus on the town of Enfield; and two annual reports (one from 1926, one from 1939) of the Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission. (If you don’t know the story of the Quabbin Reservoir’s construction, it’s worth investigating.) These materials yielded up some impressively poignant images and phrases. I would mention them here, but I am, on the whole, inclined to agree with Farge that “fascinated recollection is just not enough” (70): that there is more to writing history (and, I would add, making art) than pointing to interesting details in archival materials and saying, “Look at this!” One must endeavor to place these details in the context of the general theme of one’s work. Because I am, for now, hoarding details for future creative work, I will not elaborate, except on one point which has an interesting resonance with Steedman’s article:

Most of the cemetery photographs from Enfield were of headstones; however, there were two from what look like tombs (at Church Cemetery): brick-walled chambers about the height of a person built into the side of a small hill. A worker with a shovel propped on his shoulder (presumably involved in exhuming the bodies from the tombs) is in one photograph; a second photograph shows the same worker plus another, this one posed leaning on his shovel. Steedman writes of Jules Michelet inhaling dust in the “‘catacombs of manuscripts’ that made up the Archives Nationales in Paris in the 1820s” (1170); I wonder what stages of human decay the disinterment crews breathed in, and what they thought of it all. Can the answer be found in an archive, or did it vanish with the diggers’ own deaths? In the latter case, should/must/can that answer be guessed at by a writer of historical fiction?