Fact and Fiction: Tasso’s statement of intent

A fictional work based on a famous (or notorious) historical event has to negotiate between the factual and the fictional: it cannot contain facts or it would be plain historiography, and it cannot ignore facts completely since there will be certain expectations of historical truth from readers. This is one of the problems every writer of historical fiction has to deal with. How much adherence to truth? How many embellishments? In Canto One (for canto read chapter) of Jerusalem Delivered , Torquato Tasso, addressing himself to the Muse, friend and companion of all epic poets, apologises in advance for “embroidering” the truth. He then hastens to explain why:

In Greek mythology, the Nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mmenosyne (which means Memory: make a note of this for later!), protected the Arts and Sciences, including epic poetry and history. In this 1745 illustration of Jerusalem Delivered by Giambatista Piazzetta, the Muses are depicted on Mt Helicon, their residence, while two winged figures (top right) are carrying a cameo with Torquato Tasso’s portrait, thus glorifying him and his epic achievement.
Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.

You know how, where Parnassus most proffers

its flattering sweets, the world flocks in delight,

yet how, by charming in mellifluous verse,

Truth has disposed the most depraved to right – 

as sometimes, to a feverish child, the nurse

holds out a glass with sugared rim. Her sleigh

tricks him to drain the bitter draught. So stealth

restores him, and delusion gives him health.

Tasso, like many authors of historical fiction, clearly believes that facts must be sweetened by fiction to become more palatable, just like medicine: it is necessary and, I might add, expected. Why else would someone chose to read a historical novel and not a straight historical narrative? Of course it is these “embroideries” that made historians scoff at epic poets (or historical novelists), rejecting their accounts as false and invented. But in recent years things have become more complicated in this relationship between historical fact and fiction: from theorist Hayden White’s assertion that historical narratives, too, are verbal fictions, to historian Simon Schama’s use of fiction as a tool for reconstructing historical facts in Dead Certainties (1991), it is obvious that historiography and historical fiction are not as clear-cut, separate categories as one would like to think.