James Michener's Literary History and Psychological Realism

Introduction: Entering Michener's World

Open a book and you enter another world. The names, the places, and even the events may be familiar, yet they are not. They don't exist. They are the very personal creations of the mind of another — the mind of the writer.

As your eyes move toward that first line of text, you find that you have accepted a very special invitation: an invitation to explore the private thoughts, hopes, and ideals of another human being. It is a rare privilege, really. Under normal circumstances, we are locked out of this secret place. Most times, it is closely guarded. A chance word, a facial expression, or a gesture might lend some hint of what lies behind the mask, but we never truly know. On most occasions this world has no voice at all, or else its voice is so quiet that it is heard only by one. Sometimes, however, a thought — or thoughts — becomes so powerful that it demands to be heard. It breaks out of the prison of the psyche and exposes itself to full view. At last we learn how another individual sees those very same things that we see; how another intelligent being assembles, disassembles, and re-fashions the complex world of which we are all a part.

Books possess this special power, and great authors use them to tell us about the world as they see it. James A. Michener wrote many books about his world, once even winning a Pulitzer Prize. Michener had a talent for taking people and events from our world and inserting them into his. We read his words and see things that we never saw before. We understand injustices and hidden motives, and we realize that these things exist — not only in James A. Michener's world, but in ours as well.

As a writer, Michener is difficult to classify. In his drive to express his point of view and to highlight the difficulties and contradictions inherent in our world, he employs widely differing techniques, fusing together several genres.

Michener writes narratives; he tells what happens to selected people at certain times in certain places. His work does not fit neatly into a category like science fiction, mystery, suspense, or psychological novels. Many of his major novels can be called historical in that they reconstruct past ages. However, Michener cannot be identified with historical fiction, which presents exploits grounded in fact but relying on extravagant adventures. His historical, panoramic novels are a serious effort to explain and interpret the past by showing how events involve human beings and are influenced by them. He grounds them in great amounts of fact, a tactic that eliminates those readers uninterested in his subject. (Severson, 1996, pp. 17–18)

Literary History: Blending Fact and Fiction

The blurring of lines between genres, and the careful blending of fact and fiction, is essential if one is to convey the complexity of personalities and events. Nothing in the world happens without reference to some other event, and no human being exists totally in isolation. Perhaps Robinson Crusoe did, but even during the long years of his solitude, his thoughts and reactions were shaped by all the people, places, and events he had known before. In a sense, Crusoe's "desert island" was, in reality, densely inhabited. Like Michener's South Sea locales, his temporary home was peopled by the shadows of all his other homes — and even of many places that no one would ever consider home.

Standard histories speak of what happened, and often of how things happened as well. The people who appear in scholarly histories are something like characters in a movie: we see only what we are permitted to see, and more importantly, we are not allowed to look behind the façade. A politician or a general is an actor endlessly replaying his role. In James A. Michener's works, however, we get to see the motivations that lie behind the acts and the decisions. By peopling actual places and actual events with fictional individuals, we are able to learn the answers to questions that were perhaps never even asked of the original participants — or, if they were asked, did not receive a complete answer. Michener enables us to better comprehend real history by wrapping it in a literary history of his own creation.

As one scholar explains, "literary history" is a cross between conventional (scientific) history and pure fiction. The resulting hybrid provides access to history that the more conventional sort does not — in particular, a sense of the experiences of the historical actors, and the human meaning of historical events. This claim is demonstrated by an analysis of Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener, in which Michener's technique is to examine the effects of the Second World War and the events of 1942 on the human psyche, and to suggest how human beings have always searched for the silver lining despite the devastation and devaluation of values. He resists any kind of preaching, yet the search for peace, balance, and kindness is constantly highlighted. The facts of scientific history are woven into the loom of his unconventional history. The sense of constraint created by the formal barriers of traditional history is eased, and new possibilities for historical understanding are unveiled. (Adhikari, 2000, pp. 43–45)

Michener's literary histories bring the realities of history to a level of personal reality that each of us is capable of understanding.

Psychological Realism and World Events

The distant events of a world war, the troubles of a faraway land, and the problems of an "exotic" people form the underpinning of the classic Michener story. His genius is to transport us to all of these places without making us feel as if we have traveled any distance at all. So real are the settings and the characters that the reader believes himself or herself to have known these things, and these individuals, all of his or her life. Such is the essential role of the psychological realism that he imparts to his new historicist narrative.

Michener is fully cognizant of the part played by human psychology in the shaping of world events. Though they may seem larger than life, the great men and women who mold our world are themselves human beings, with their own psychological problems and foibles just like the rest of us. Michener uses these psychological traits to predict actions and situations, and he can only weave his tales by closely observing the real actors in the story. In an interview, James A. Michener gave his own assessment of a number of world leaders:

Olof Palme of Sweden, Indira Gandhi of India, and DeGaulle of France — they may have been exactly the people that their countries needed at that time, irritating though they may have been. I found Israel's Menachem Begin an anachronism, and I think Israel suffered a tremendous psychological setback when they chose Moshe Dayan and Begin as their heroes to present on the international stage. But I felt the opposite about Anwar Sadat of Egypt. He had a degree of courage greater than any I've ever exhibited. He had to go up against the kind of volatile opinion that eventually destroyed him. (Grobel, 1999, p. 178)

His works follow the example of these real-world politicians. In fiction, as in life, their experiences ultimately affect millions around them. Might the world have been a different place if Anwar Sadat or Indira Gandhi had been brought up differently — had these and other individuals not witnessed the events they witnessed, even the most minor and personal of events? Michener would appear to answer with a resounding "Yes!"

References

Adhikari, Madhumalati. (December 2002). "History and Story: Unconventional History in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific." History and Theory, 41, Theme Issue 41, 43–55.

Carty, T. (2001). The Catholic question: Religious liberty and JFK's pursuit of the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. The Historian, 63(3), 577.

Grobel, L. (1999). Talking with Michener. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Mackenzie, G. C. (1996). The irony of reform: Roots of American political disenchantment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Severson, M. S. (1996). James A. Michener: A critical companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Yanarella, E. J., & Sigelman, L. (Eds.). (1988). Political mythology and popular fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.