I should have posted about this on the fourth, when it happened, but I’ve been having difficulty organizing my thoughts. I think everything’s straight in my mind now.
I met Guy Gavriel Kay recently when he was guest lecturer for a Forms of Fantasy class here at UW. The lecture was meant to be on the tools of the fantasy writer, and to a certain extent it was, but he spent most of the lecture discussing his book, Tigana.
I had not read the book (and I still haven’t finished it), but I did have a question in mind. Since it’s well-known that Kay’s books are thinly veiled historical fictions, I asked him to comment on the ethics of using historical facts as source material for literature. I was rewarded with a long and confident answer. Kay once gave a lecture (later printed in issue 108 of Queen’s Quarterly—you can read it here) on that very subject, and I knew he was passionate about the issue.
Kay sees the direct use of real people as an ethical failure on the part of the author. He sees it mostly as an invasion of privacy resulting from a sense of entitlement, that sense of entitlement resulting from an exhibitionist impulse. If we allow others to look in on our life (in the form of reality tv, certain internet fads, and other phenomena), should we not expect others to allow us to look into their lives? Kay thinks that no, we should not. He cites books like The English Patient, which portray individuals in a way inconsistent with what we know about them. What happens, he asks, to the real story? And that’s a very good question.
He offered two solutions to the moral dilemma. The first solution, which was what he did himself, was to take the “flavour” of the people and time you want to deal with, but place it in a fantasy setting. If you wish to include tropes from the genre you may, of course. How many and in what way is completely up to you. I both like and dislike this solution. I like it, because it helps create more believable, literate fantasy, which is something I think the genre needs badly, if not mostly for its image. But I dislike it because it distances history and potentially reduces into mere scenery the reality of how our world and its people were shaped.
The second solution is one I like a little better. Kay sides with Sir Walter Scott; it is acceptable to use real historical people (living or dead) provided they are not “point of view characters,” ie. they stay on the periphery. That way you can avoid putting words in their mouths, or portraying them in ways not consistent with what is known about them.
I have one concern, which Kay mentions in the essay, and thankfully he’s a bit ambivalent about it: should we, as a society, impose limits on our artists (in this case writers)? My answer is no. While my own agenda as a writer is not overtly political enough to include real people as major (ie. POV) characters, I would hate to be deprived of the option of using them as such, even though I will probably never do so. I think it comes down to the individual writer, and how easy he finds it to look at himself in the mirror every morning, where the lines are drawn. My line is different from Guy Gavriel Kay’s. Where’s yours?
