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• W2761459206 abstract "RONALD W. TABER Washington State University Varáis Fisher: New Directions for the Historical Novel The terms “romance” and “historical novel” were, for a long time, practically synonymous, as novelist MacKinlay Kantor has noted.1 There had long been murmurs of protest against the ro­ mantic and prudish historical novel, but nineteenth century tradi­ tion continued to influence the historical novel until the 1930’s produced novelists, such as Kantor and Vardis Fisher, who were determined to portray the past realistically. American historical novelists began to feel the need to tell the truth about history7 , convinced that the novel could elucidate and extend man’s knowl­ edge better than the works of professional historians. No one was more in the forefront of this new movement to demand truth and historical accuracy in the American historical novel than Vardis Fisher. To understand Fisher’s illumination of historical truth through fiction, it is necessary to investigate two aspects of his approach to historical fiction: his philosophy and his methodology. Fisher’s philosophy of literature, although by no means new, is not generally popular in current “art for art’s sake” literary circles. But, in help­ ing to create what E.E. Leisy calls a possible “fourth form” of the historical novel “which appears to be developing into a favorite,”2 Editor’s Note: A paper presented in the Western Americana and Folklore Section of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Meeting, October 14, 1966, at the University of Utah. 1MacKinlay Kantor, Irving Stone, and John O’Hara, Three Views of the Novel (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), p. 36. 2Ernest E. Leisy, The American Historical Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), p. 19. 286 Western American Literature Fisher’s methodology has coincided remarkably with that advo­ cated by some of the world’s most original historical thinkers. The combination of Fisher’s philosophy and methodology has resulted in a different kind of historical novel. Fisher’s objective is to understand man, who he is, why he is as he is, and what his motivations and capabilities are. He has, therefore, chosen to write about the past, not merely to explain the facts of a historical period, but, because the past is so intimately connected with the present, to aid contemporary man in his quest for self-knowledge. Fisher developed the idea that the past is inti­ mately connected to the present after writing the Vridar Hunter Tetralogy, in which he had tried to discover answers to his ques­ tions about man through an autobiographical probing of his early years. Fisher decided that the answers he was seeking were not to be found in a single individual, and he began to speculate that perhaps nothing short of the whole course of history, which re­ veals the development of man, would suffice in the understanding of an individual. Fisher came to believe that the mind of the past has developed a vast “variety and richness” of symbols “which still shape and direct all of us in ways we never suspect.” Fisher concludes, however, that the past is not benign; it constitutes a “standing menace to us and our civilization.”3 Fisher believes that the historical novel can help man to consciously realize how the terrible harm, as well as the good, of the past has affected the psychological and moral health of both society and the individual. It is because he believes that man’s ability to rise above his present situation is related to his knowledge of the past which created those circumstances, that Fisher has become a historical novelist. It is, therefore, an intense interest in the present that leads Fisher to investigate and write about the past. He states: “Under­ standing what is necessary to say about the part of today that yes­ terday is is exactly the novelist’s task. It is a task that still defeats us.”4 Fisher’s philosophy of literature as a useful agent in the de­ velopment and enlightening of mankind is expressed in his intro­ duction to Orphans in Gethsemane-. I stand on this, that if mankind is ever to build a civilization worthy of that devotion which it..." @default.
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• W2761459206 date "1967-01-01" @default.
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• W2761459206 title "Vardis Fisher: New Directions for the Historical Novel" @default.
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• W2761459206 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1967.0071" @default.
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