Lydia Davis on historical nuance

[breathedout]

But to take up another part of your answer, the history of Mussolini’s reception in the U.K. and particularly in Scotland, it seems to me vital to keep nuancing, and when necessary denying, our oversimplified conceptions of historical events and periods. We do tend to reduce figures as immensely important as Winston Churchill almost to caricatures, rather than seeing them clearly as fallible individuals acting with great vision at certain times and quite wrongheadedly at others. What is so vital about reimagining all this in fictional terms, as you have done in The Emperor of Ice-Cream, is that only through fiction can we more completely reenter a historical period, with full empathy, rather than with merely intellectual appreciation.

—Lydia Davis, in a Conversation with Dann Gunn about Samuel Beckett, translation and transliteration, historicity in fiction, and much more (emphasis added).

This pursuit of empathic nuance is something I think about a lot while writing, both from a historical-fiction perspective as Gunn and Davis are discussing, and also from a more general perspective that considers the way personal, embodied individuality intersects with–or creates uncomfortable friction with–political stances; the way individual people are almost always conflicted, fallible and self-contradictory. It’s something I think is very, very tempting to oversimplify, in both fiction-writing and activist circles, as one searches for heroes, villains, or characters who are wholly sympathetic or unsympathetic.