The American search for a usable past began with our first writers. American historians, cultural critics, and artists have repeatedly rewritten our history in response to evolving philosophies and social issues. And novelist, both serious and popular, have followed close behind, infusing fictional human relations with historical reality to cultivate—or to create—myths about our past. The old, tenacious forms of historical fiction either glamorize the past, reinforcing old myths of greatness, or revise history by exposing the lust, greed, despair, or irrationality of ages or men once considered stable, moral, and vital. But although contemporary novelists like Roth, Doctorow, Pynchon, Barth, and Ishmael Reed still mine and recast history, they have renewed and transformed the once-belittled historical novel. These novelists go beyond mere revisionism, questioning the possibility of historical understanding, rejecting the limits of historical reality and even of verisimilitude, exposing the irrelevance of both revering and rejecting the past.
The most recent example of this new kind of historical novel is Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada. Through parody, exaggeration, anachronism, and the juxtaposition of literary myths, Reed transforms the experiences of slavery and the Civil War into comedy. Reed's two previous excursions into the American past, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Mumbo Jumbo, exploit eras more easily transformed into comedy: the American West and the Twenties. But slavery, the Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln? Although they furnish material for the countless contradictory theses of historians, essayists, poets, and novelists, these aspects of our past have always been considered either tragic or epic. However Ishmael Reed has little use for the romanticism or social realism traditionally associated with the relations of slave and master. (p. 200)
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