History and the Novel

In fiction-writing there's a lot of talk about empathy, which isn't really any different from what I meant by sympathy the other day. Novels are often about the possibility of entering another mind. That idea seems very similar to R.G. Collingwood's conception of what history should be: the rethinking of past thoughts (my understanding of Collingwood comes not yet from reading his books, but from a great lecture by George Garnett). To me, it seems that written history normally fails at this task - or, rather, few historians attempt it - while fiction has been capable of amazing things. To enter someone's mind in fiction is always moving; history rarely is.

What's the different between what novelists are trying to do and what historians are trying to do? Is there a difference between what they should be trying to do, or in what they succeed in doing, or are capable of? From the reader's side, how do we use history, and how do we use novels?

History appears to work on a rational level as opposed to novels working on an emotional one, but I think that distinction is misleading. People use history books to develop and buttress their ideas and beliefs about the world; and they do the same with novels. There's no meaningful way to draw a line between the 'factual' or rational element of those ideas and beliefs, and the emotional or irrational element. One kind of difference could be in scale: histories are macro, novels micro. But that obviously doesn't hold universally: compare War & Peace with The Cheese and the Worms. What does this kind of scaling even mean, and how do novelists, historians, and readers make choices about it?

This problem of scale is central to the greater problem that both history and fiction share: how are we different from each other, how the same? Across time, space, culture, and every other kind of division, what unites us, what divides? The possibility of sympathy must be part of our answer.