Oral History and the Boundaries of Fiction

Abstract

I FLINCHED when I saw it. Never before had the contents of The Public Historian prompted such a visceral reaction. But there it was, undeniably, on pages 38 and 39 of the Winter 1984 issue of this quarterly journal.1 The right-hand page boldly heralded an essay by John E. Wills, Jr., entitled Taking Historical Novels Seriously. Facing from the left-hand page was a photograph illustrating three books all bedecked with dust-jacket costumes, all propped atop a horizontal copy of An Explanation of World History, the massive tome by William L. Langer, Jr. The visual message was unmistakable: these historical novels can elucidate aspects of mankind's diverse adventures through time. I had no quarrel with two of these books, Ole E. Rolvaag's saga of Norwegian-American pioneers the austere Dakota Territory, Giants the Earth, and James Clavell's epic of Japan, Sh6gun. But the third was Alex Haley's Roots. For this oral historian the juxtaposition was unnerving. Roots is historical fiction? Others classify it as oral history. Is oral history fiction? The implications were hardly comforting. Actually, Wills has little to say about Roots beyond acknowledging it owed its appeal both to its link to an actual family story and to Haley's skill developing imaginary situations and dialogue that went well beyond his family traditions. Wills is harsher with the televised version of Roots: It would be easy to carp at the latter, with its idyllic West Africa, its Hollywood-style romanticization of relations among slaves, and its omission of so much of the information that enriches the book. Nonetheless, he concedes that in the extraordinary performances of its black actors and the reaching and moving of huge numbers of people who don't read books at all, it went far beyond the book as a national political and moral event.2