Banks, Russell - Millicent Bell (review date fall 1998)

Millicent Bell (review date fall 1998)

SOURCE: Bell, Millicent. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 54, no. 4 (fall 1998): 635-39.

[In the following excerpt, Bell elucidates various perspectives on the historical figure of John Brown and views Cloudsplitter as a work of revisionist history.]

The word “history”—whatever the postmodernists claim—retains the sense of what actually was, however squintedly seen, remembered, or recounted. But history is also what historians say happened—as fiction, a story (that shorter word derived from it and coiled into it, like a worm in an apple). The historians' history is a sense-making tale that tries to explain why things occurred as they did and somehow makes them visible inside our heads. History is never more “virtual” than when it resembles a novel. At the same time, the novel incorporates literal history. Laying aside its pretense of invention and...

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