Fiction makes history
Historians, some of them, worry that intentional fiction becomes mistaken for genuine history. A July 6, 2006 press release (from the University of Leeds) hints at some of that distress:
The 2006 International Medieval Congress (IMC) takes place from 10 to 13 July, and one of its many offerings is a discussion of how The Da Vinci Code has affected public perception and undermined the authority of historical proof.
The Da Vinci Code is by no means the only fiction book that has, in this sense, made history. Professor Joep Leerssen of the University of Amsterdam tells us about a more curious case:
In 1991 I published a novel in my native dialect, Limburgish, an obscure regional language in The Netherlands akin to Luxemburgish. It was set in my home village, but a home village transformed and mythologized as in Fellini’s “Amarcord”, or in Chagall paintings. The title was ?’t Verhaol Muringe m?t en z?nder Paulien?: The Story called Muringen, with and without Pauline — Muringen being the name of the fictionalized village.
Some scenes were set in a pub which used to be run, when I was a lad, by a notorious, scrawny, loud-voiced, very special old woman named Majja Hagestein. She was so special I multiplied her into three and wrote that she was the last of three sisters running that pub. (Threefold goddesses were a bit of a theme in that novel. Another woman who used to run a diner I likewise turned into a trinity, with the portentous names of Nora, Meta and Dentata.)
The novel became a success, by Limburg standards at least, and a television team came to my village to interview me and the locals. We were chatting in the local bar when that other pub, and Majja Hagestein, entered the conversation. The TV guy asked about her “and her two sisters before her”. The barman turned to his elderly mother, also present to check out the TV crew, and asked her: “Do you remember Majja Hagestein? Was there something with two sisters?” And the mother replied: “Oh, well, yes… yes… that was a tragic story, that, about Majja and her two sisters…”
Since then, the notorious Majja Hagestein is uniformly believed to have been three sisters. That pleased me no end, because my book was about a village that came into being by being narrated (hence the title), and the narration washed back into real life, and made it special.
I don’t know if you can do anything with this, but it was fun to recall it and write it down.
By the way: The name of Majja Hagestein’s pub, I kid you not, was “Duivenmaatschappij De Snelheid”, which would translate as ?Pigeon Fanciers’ Society “Velocity”?. It’s now a Yugoslav restaurant run by an immigrant from Mostar. Life is wonderful.
(Thanks to investigator Phil O’Leary for introducing us to investigator Leerssen)