SOURCE: Bell, Millicent. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 54, no. 4 (fall 1998): 635-39.

In the following excerpt, Bell elucidates various perspectives on the historical figure of John Brown and views Cloudsplitter as a work of revisionist history.

The word “history”—whatever the postmodernists claim—retains the sense of what actually was, however squintedly seen, remembered, or recounted. But history is also what historians say happened—as fiction, a story (that shorter word derived from it and coiled into it, like a worm in an apple). The historians' history is a sense-making tale that tries to explain why things occurred as they did and somehow makes them visible inside our heads. History is never more “virtual” than when it resembles a novel. At the same time, the novel incorporates literal history. Laying aside its pretense of invention and resorting directly to truth-telling, the novel even sometimes lets in among its imagined persons...