The Puzzle of Historical Criticism

The Puzzle of Factual Praise

“…Yet, despite the nature of fiction, it seems historical inaccuracies sometimes count against the artistic value of unequivocally fictional works. As an example, Christopher Bartel (, 213) appeals to the film U‐571 , which depicts a pivotal event in World War II. In the film, a German‐disguised United States naval crew boards a German submarine and captures its Enigma cipher machine, which is needed to break the German Navy's coded messages.…”

“…But while the film enjoyed general success in the United States, it received serious criticism for its distortion of history. Even Tony Blair publicly condemned the film (Bartel , 221). Since the film centers on the story of the capture of the Enigma machine, there appears to be a demand for, or at least expectation of, being faithful to the key elements of that story.…”

“…And most of us are not willing to give up either intuition. Thus, either the standard account of fiction as make‐believe must be adjusted to accommodate the relevance of historical truth to artistic value or else the intuition that historical truth is relevant to artistic value must be explained away (Bartel , 214).…”

“…One means of explaining away is to pin the intuition on genre conventions (see Bartel , 216 and Lamarque , 230–231). The thought goes as follows.…”

“…Bartel raises two objections to this approach (, 217). First, the appeal to genre conventions does not really explain the intuition that historical accuracy sometimes matters in the evaluation of fictional works.…”