Hazy Boundaries

I realize the post is awkwardly titled, and no this isn't a trashy spin off song to Blurred Lines, but instead I'm referring to the hazy boundaries between history and fiction. Coming into the class this semester I saw history and fiction as polar opposites, with no ambiguous gray areas. History was history, it was fact, it was the veritable truth, and it was what we were taught academically. Fiction on the other hand was a manmade product of the imagination, conceived solely with the purpose of being read for pleasure and entertainment. History was confined to the pages of textbooks and fiction only appeared in the chapters of a novel. As the class dragged on, I later came to realize that there was a lot of intersectionality between the two. Not all fiction was history, but essentially all history is, in some aspects at least, fictional. History by definition is the recorded accounts of past events, but we find that these events are almost always recorded by those who weren't present or even alive in these monumental moments. History acts like a collective memory of society, in which bits and pieces of memories of witnesses and survivors are threaded together into a story until it feels real. But, as we all know, memory is a very finicky thing, and just psychologically speaking, highly unreliable. As we rely on a smattering of memories to come together to form our perception of history, we invite in so much more with each account. We leave room for biases, forgotten details, overarching story lines, and intimate subplots, until we're left with humanity embedded into our histories. Every bit of history we've learned thus far comes with the baggage of time and perspective, and varies from how we've learned it. It's actually ridiculously logical how closely related history and fiction are, I'm just surprised it took me a whole English class to finally acknowledge it.