Writing: Fiction Meets History

While reading DID DON QUIXOTE LONG FOR MUSLIM SPAIN? out of sheer curiosity, I ran across the following paragraph:

Novels can say what history silences. In the centuries since Don Quixote, the form has given us a single June day in the city of Dublin, regret in a house on Mango Street, and an old train climbing the hill toward Macondo. Like the questions posed in Gabriel García Márquez’s Aracataca, Sandra Cisneros’s Chicago, and James Joyce’s Dublin, the irony and humor of Cervantes’s novel ask questions about Spain that are otherwise unutterable—questions about state policies and religious beliefs, about personhood and belonging, in ways that emphasize the distance between truth and fiction, between perception and reality.

 Fiction can make us feel history as it makes us feel the facts of every day life. History being the accumulation of life's facts. Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad makes us feel the terror and barbarity of chattel slavery as John Updike made us feel the life of Rabbit Angstrom. We need to keep this in mind as American democracy is threatened by anti-democratic forces.

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12/30/21