Thou Shalt Not Commit Anachronism!
Many years ago a popular African American magazine hosted a short story contest. I was a reader, one of the people charged with shortlisting semifinalist entries to pass onto the judges.
Some of the work was decent, some God-awful. Some of it was pretty good, but I had to sort through piles of chaff to find it. Still, I’d submitted to many writing contest myself and wanted to give careful attention to what the writers had put time and energy into crafting.
One piece was historical fiction about a freedman looking for a loved one lost during slavery. The journey quest narrative is a favorite of mine, so I began reading with great interest. The writing wasn’t brilliant, but it wasn’t terrible. Then the protagonist shows around a picture of his loved one. Well, okay. Photography was a new, expensive technology, but I was willing to go with it… until he receives a phone call revealing a valuable clue to the person’s whereabouts. That’s when I wanted to throw the story across the room.
This writer had violated the first commandment of historical fiction: “Thou shalt not commit anachronism.” An anachronism is a reference out of its proper historical time period. Telephones clearly had not been invented in the mid-1800’s. I also had to admit how unlikely it was for an enslaved person to have a photo taken, and for a freed slave to obtain one.
Other anachronisms may be subtler but just as problematic. Harlem in the 18th century had a vastly different milieu than in the 1920’s. A gay person living a century ago would have a very different experience than one in today’s world, where queer culture is more mainstream.
The key to avoiding anachronisms is research. I’m writing historical fiction partially set in Black Chicago of the 1920’s. I can’t assume that because I’ve lived there since the mid-1950’s, the experience would be the same. People listened to different music, ate different food, wore different clothing, worked different jobs. There was a distinctive political reality in those early years of the Great Migration, the aftermath of World War I, the Red Summer of 1919.
Anachronisms are to be scrupulously avoided except when the writer is deploying them for humor or irony. Take Self-Made, a highly fictionalized miniseries on the life of entrepreneur philanthropist, Madam C.J. Walker. The interludes where she shadowboxes to rap music are deliberately stylized metaphors of struggle meant to play to 21stcentury audiences.
On the other hand, in a scene where members of a Negro women’s club witness Walker’s (historically inaccurate) confrontation with Booker T. Washington, they break out the champagne to celebrate. A central tenant of this movement was temperance, an organized effort to outlaw the transport, sales, and consumption of alcohol. That bourgie group of women wouldn’t have been caught dead guzzling champagne. There were so many other anachronisms in the series that if there’s a literary hell, I suspect that writer might be condemned to it.
Of all the other errors in historical fiction—presentism, info dumping, temporal and cultural specificity—I believe anachronism to be the worse offender.