Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - M. Thomas Inge: Sam Watkins and the Fictionality of Fact

than that of many more important but far less intelligent men who occupied posts of high responsibility in the years 1861—1865."

8 As for the events themselves, Watkins affirmed, "every word of this is true... everything in this book" (W, 156). The British historian Herbert Butterfield suggested in his essay on the "historical novel" that "history cannot come so near to human hearts and human passions as a good novel can; its very fidelity to facts makes it not perhaps less true to life, but farther away from the heart of things."

9 Watkins's piece of personal history then moves towards fiction in its reflections on "human hearts and human passions" in conflict and takes us to the heart of the absurd experience of war. Effective fiction, however, according to Butterfield, also possesses a historical sensibility: It is when the reader can feel that the things that are being related actually took place, and that the man about whom the stories are being told really lived although the stories about him may not all be true; it is when the thread of incident in the novel, as well as what might be called the texture of the book, can in some way be called "historical," that the work is most effective in its grip on actuality.

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0 "Co. Aytch" clearly has, then, the narrrative power of fiction about which Butterfield speaks, and we come to know and believe in Sam Watkins as a real person, not because he was, but because of the dramatic appeal of his literary ability as a writer. In answer to the question, "Why do we read fiction?" Robert Penn Warren once wrote: The answer is simple. We read it because we like it. And we like it because fiction, as an image of life, stimulates and 8 Basler, "Introduction," 9. 9 Herbert Butterfield, The Hisrorical Novel: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924) 18. 1

0 Butterfield, The Historical Novel, 52. 58