Ron Rash on Historical Fiction

26 July 2016: What can historical fiction achieve? That's a question at the heart of "The Facts of Historical Fiction," a short essay by Ron Rash, and a piece I spent some time thinking about today as I worked on an article about his work. In this essay, he discusses The World Made Straight, which in part explores the Shelton Laurel Massacre of 1863. He asks the big questions: What happened there? What made people shoot old men and young boys, men and boys they knew and lived with? And, on a larger scale, why do people commit such atrocities? Rash's piece is from 2006, but his questions are (sadly) timeless. And fiction, he asserts, can help us muddle our way through these questions.

As he moves towards the end of the piece, Rash writes about what he—as a writer—learned and didn't learn as he wrote his novel: "But if I failed to achieve understanding, I gained awareness. That may be the best that any work of historical fiction has to offer—not just to its author, but, more importantly, to its readers—a chance to grapple with the mysteries and complexities of the past, in hopes of seeing the present a little clearer."

I like this essay for many reasons, including how quintessentially Rash-ian (?) it is. It speaks to the specific and the universal, the local and the global. It points out what is gained, but also what is obscured or resists easy grasp. The last line, in fact, simply reads "It [the massacre] haunts me still."

Work Cited

Rash, Ron. "The Facts of Historical Fiction." Publishers Weekly, April 10, 2006. 78. Academic Search Complete. 25 July 2016. Web.