Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Why Expect Off-time Political Correctness from Fiction?

Recently, I read and reviewed a WdC Writer’s novel both here and in its Amazon page. I felt the book was well-written, in careful detail, and with great scenes and characters to fit the story’s time, which was the Depression Era.


What grossed me out was not the book or the writer, but some of the reviews for it by uninformed readers on the page in Amazon. Some readers expected the male lead to fit what we expect from males according to today’s understanding. Unreal!


There is a term for the faux pas of pushing present-day understanding into past events. Historians use the term and fear its application and the results of it; that is, most of the time. The term is Presentism.


The fear of presentism is a real one as its usage in serious writing creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter.

For more on the subject:
http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2002/0205/0205pre1.cfm


For the fiction writer, presentism can be used, however subtly, but it may complicate a story and may contribute to loss of effective story impression and the story’s trustworthiness. In a convincing story, the characters and the story are imagined but are better represented in real time, even if the story is a time-travel one.


Surely, one can do what one wants in fiction. There is even a book of fiction that shows the Third Reich as having won the World War II. (Heaven forbid!) It was that writer's choice. Our writer preferred to stick to the facts of her story’s real time, and I applaud her for it. Truth is, all stories are written about the past or as occurring in the past. As times change, the world, opinions, perceptions, interpretations, and cultural elements also change. Why is this so difficult to understand by the readers!


I personally love to read what is objective and accurate, and true to the story’s purpose, and I think no writer should be made to worry about any reader presentism.