What is it to have an imagination of the past? How do we get a mental picture of the past? Historical fiction is not a record of the past. It's more of an attitude toward the past, that foreign country where we are only visitors. Postmodernists will tell us that we can't ever visit the past because our big fat self is in the way, blocking the view. Everything I see is Me. But we know that we need a sense of the past. Whether we are trying to deal with the legacy of the events of 9/11/2001 or we are trying to see this year's presidential elections in terms of an echo of the 1930's, we have rely on an imagined past. The past is gone, but we have to believe that we can find enough of it to make sense of how the causes from then to the effects now.
Historical fiction is one way we build this faith that the facts can be found, the past can be re-constructed, the present can made comprehensible. The fiction is not an actual record. It has facts in it but like all fiction it is a metaphor. None of these events happened just as described, but they are similar enough to tell us something significant about the past. Chuck Parker lives in a time when shame held a great deal of power. He also lived in a time of tremendous transition. You could watch cowboy pictures in the theaters and imagine a wild west. But up in the air there were now jets -- America started commercially using jets in 1959. My novel reflects this fact in one scene but it blends the experience of seeing a jet trail in the sky in 1958 with a sense of what it might have felt like to look up in the sky any time in the next twenty years. Why? Well, I wrote the scene partly based on my own memories of watching jets flying overhead to Chicago -- most likely from Detroit but possibly from New York. But I had asked my dad if he remember the first time he ever saw a jet trail in the sky. He couldn't. Isn't that the way of it when we live through history? The times are changing even more than we had realized.
I hope you are able to pick up a copy of The Merry Life of Charles Parker.
Historical fiction is one way we build this faith that the facts can be found, the past can be re-constructed, the present can made comprehensible. The fiction is not an actual record. It has facts in it but like all fiction it is a metaphor. None of these events happened just as described, but they are similar enough to tell us something significant about the past. Chuck Parker lives in a time when shame held a great deal of power. He also lived in a time of tremendous transition. You could watch cowboy pictures in the theaters and imagine a wild west. But up in the air there were now jets -- America started commercially using jets in 1959. My novel reflects this fact in one scene but it blends the experience of seeing a jet trail in the sky in 1958 with a sense of what it might have felt like to look up in the sky any time in the next twenty years. Why? Well, I wrote the scene partly based on my own memories of watching jets flying overhead to Chicago -- most likely from Detroit but possibly from New York. But I had asked my dad if he remember the first time he ever saw a jet trail in the sky. He couldn't. Isn't that the way of it when we live through history? The times are changing even more than we had realized.
I hope you are able to pick up a copy of The Merry Life of Charles Parker.
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