Historical persons have long been accepted as characters in novels, whereas a claim that fiction can animate biography is certain to be controversial. For Ackroyd, the claim arises from the genre's nature: a biographer is continuously aware of "just how much cannot be known," yet "the uncertainty principle" is "quite impossible to build into biography." The novelist's tools can help to "make the narrative coherent." In part, Ackroyd admits, this involves what he calls cheating: deliberately confusing the biographer's "act of interpretation" with the novelist's ability to "insist that things happen the way they ought to happen." But in a more fundamental sense, Ackroyd's approach involves identification with history: "I realized I was able to understand the past in a kind of concrete way, think myself back into it." The primary means of this is language: "the only way of getting a grip on the past ... was to write the language of the past"--in biography, to identify with the literary style of the subject and with the milieu that formed it. This notion of imaginative identification is visionary--to cite the characteristic Ackroyd believes his fictional and biographical protagonists share--but it provides the motivating tension of his writing in both genres.
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