역사와 허구의 경계: 교실에서 역사소설 혹은 시대소설 가르치기

Abstract

A deep understanding of the past is always needed to correctly understand the contemporary and to wisely guide the future world. As the blending history and fiction, the historical fiction helps us to do something which history cannot offer. In the historical fiction, the readers can read the concrete reality of the small-scale life which were often omitted in the history. The traditional macro-scale quantitative history usually have been focusing on the powerful persons and nations based on the hard and dry facts. On the contrary, the historical fiction tends to show us the minor and disregarded characters with much sympathy and affection. In this article I analysed three historical novels among American young adult fiction: Ann Petry's Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain, and Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret. As a kind of microhistory, all these three novels reveal the detailed private and domestic lives of outsiders rather than the influential people's public lives. By finding out the hidden aspects of the important social events through these marginalized yet significant characters' active participations, the readers realize that the authentic and traditional history are not always correct and often distorted by prejudices of mainstream parties. The above-mentioned three historical novels are different in terms of the degree in mixture between facts and imagination. Ann Petry's description of Harriet Tubman is closest to the faithful description of historical facts because she uses the real historical persons, events and letters in her plot. In this regard her descriptive style is very similar to biographer's. In contrast, Esther Forbes's creation of Johnny Tremain is very fictional, although the author introduces some real historical characters in part. However, as a critic mentions "If Jonathan Lyte Tremain never lived in the flesh, he lives vividly with the men of his time," her fictional characters function like real persons to most of readers, and widen and deepen our understanding of the past history with more clear vision and mature consideration. Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret is the most loosely based upon the real facts among the three works so that many readers don't recognize the facts happened behind the fiction. Despite of these differences of degrees in combination between factual and imaginative elements, all the historical fiction have something in common: as Stephen Crane once mentioned, "it makes us feel as a protagonist." Through historical fiction we also feel the "truth of heart" as the bigger truth than the truth of dry and sorted facts thanks to the thick description of the hidden episode.