A WRITER sent me a novel he’d written based upon the life of a historical person, and in order to impress me with its importance he claimed in his accompanying note that every fact in it was true.

Often one sees a novel advertised as being inspired by a true story, which advertising strategy assumes that people are more turned on by what they’re told is true than by what is presented as fiction. There seems to be a universal understanding that when the source of its material is historical fact then a fictional representation of the story that does not deviate from what truly happened has inevitably to be a commendable novel. The claim that the novel’s action is a record of true events also anticipates any criticism of the story: whatever the accusation — inconsistencies in the plot, implausible coincidences, unbelievable characters — the writer merely shrugs his shoulders and exempts himself from any responsibility by repeating his claim that every fact of the story is true.

Biographical truth, however, is no guarantee of a book’s quality. Every statement, that is to say, every construction of language, is built according to the rules of grammar and usage and the reader’s credibility is dependent upon his or her perception of the correct application of those rules. In much of human discourse our usage of language is restricted to communicating basic information, which is usually expressed in the familiar terms of what Paul Valéry calls “utilitarian language” which is void of any stylistic adornment. But when writing a literary text we have an obligation, as Henry James insisted, to make it interesting, and the extent to which it will be interesting is directly related to the writer’s ability to play the goldsmith with words to press them into a unique pattern, and this special language, which, unrelated to any practical order but singularly revelatory, will summon for the envisioning human imagination what Valéry refers to as “the poetic universe.” It is this linguistic formulation, with its ceaseless obsession with rearranging the symbols of discourse into an original combination, which alone gives definition to the complex confusion witnessed by our senses that we call reality.

The historical novelist’s claim of a privileged insight into reality has to be inconsequential when what we know of reality is not only that confusion in our senses but also the mass of contradictory propositions lodged in our brains as dogma by the competing forces of science and religion. We interpret our experience so that it fits snugly into the doctrinal framework of an inherited or adopted faith, which, influenced by the accidental circumstances of life, could be anything from Astrophysics to Zoroastrianism.

Philosophers and scientists have attempted to come up with some plausible idea of reality that is not merely a set of postulated beliefs to be accepted by a blind adherence to a faith, and after thousands of years of their investigations and experiments all we have from the philosophers are words defining words and from the scientists an expanding universe that to ordinary understanding remains as invisible as the ones proposed by religions. We are left with only fictional representations of reality, each one, whether it is that beguiling siren Scheherazade whispering rumours of an enchanting world into our ear or a solemn scientist taking us on a Hubble ride among the stars, no more than a set of formal propositions that may or may not suggest a plausible vision of reality. Each one leaves us staring at words that we interpret to suit the peculiar predilection that we favour, accepting those as meaningful which affirm our prejudices and rejecting the others as meaningless.

Remember that scene in Hamlet where Hamlet enters, the stage-direction states, “reading on a book”? Polonius asks him, “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet could conceivably, and quite convincingly, have answered, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics” or “Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.” But he says, “Words, words, words.” He was not pretending to be mad, rather he was scrupulously expressing the literal truth. Four hundred years later, even Wittgenstein did not have much more to say about the language with which we attempt to define reality: the closing conclusion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — “Whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent” — echoes Hamlet’s final words, “The rest is silence.”

Historical truth, too, is words, words, words, and however those words are assembled there can be no necessary connection between them and the reality they attempt to represent, only an agreement between like-minded humans that the words that have been coined for certain objects do represent an idea of those objects. As Valéry remarks, what we call horse in English, cheval in French, equus in Latin, and so on, are sounds that in themselves do not give us an idea of the animal in question; it is our common agreement that establishes a connection between a word and an object. Therefore, the composed language either lights up the reader’s imagination with wonder and delight when that usage is charged by the force of an original style or it merely fills the imagination with the murky grey of one writer’s formulaic assemblage of received ideas that will soon be forgotten to be replaced by a reshuffling of the same formula by another writer.

Drama, more than the novel, graphically illustrates this distinction. What makes Shakespeare’s history plays interesting is not the history that they incidentally narrate but what his characters say and do. Richard III’s first words, “Now is the winter of our discontent…,” have little to do with any history, but are so memorably spoken that the phrase is often used by people who have no idea where it comes from. What really makes his history plays interesting is Shakespeare’s populating them not exclusively with figures of history but also with people of his own creation: Bardolph, Pistol, Mistress Quickly and above all Falstaff; indeed, it is thanks to these invented characters that the two plays associated with Henry IV are the most entertaining of Shakespeare’s history plays.

Who remembers the dukes, ambassadors, archbishops, and some of the kings themselves? Does anyone retain an image of King John who has a whole play to himself? But there are people who have never seen or read the plays for whom Falstaff is a real person. Artistic delight results from the imagination’s subversion of historical truth into a world of its own creation: art is but a persuasive language projected in unfamiliar forms which reveal a hitherto hidden dimension of the world we imagine we inhabit.

I am, as some readers know, no stranger to historical fiction. Been there, done that, nearly 50 years ago when I wrote The Incredible Brazilian. Let me rehearse some facts connected with the writing of this trilogy. It began with the coincidence of discovering in a bookshop on returning to London almost immediately after my first visit to Brazil the great masterpiece of Brazilian sociology, The Masters and the Slaves by Gilberto Freyre. A second coincidence was that when returning to London, I had stopped in New York to visit my friend Thomas Berger who had recently published his wonderful novel, Little Big Man. The two books whirled in my brain like clay on a potter’s wheel, the historical information of one becoming shaped by the guiding hand of Berger’s style, and then being fired in my heated imagination to become my novel.

Most people know Little Big Man as the 1970 movie starring Dustin Hoffman. Interesting though the film was, and important in changing the dynamic of the Western movie by abandoning the stereotype of the native American as villain, it does not — no movie can — present the book’s wide range of ideas. The basic premise of the book is to involve a character with the nation’s history by associating him with the key events and figures during the century of his existence. In the process, Berger creates a novel which engages the reader at several levels, from the engrossing story that holds the reader with its richly detailed narrative of action filled with surprising twists and hilarious situations to a profoundly philosophical work. It can be read as an illustrated history of the country’s transformation from a pre-Columbian “natural” state to a European “civilised” one, with all the attendant ironies associated with either condition, or read as an anthropological study of the variety of human species inhabiting America; and, like many major works of literature, it can be considered as a metaphysical text that has a Socratic dialogue with reality. It is a hugely complex work that has yet to be fully appreciated.

Being his friend, I was naturally drawn to compliment him through hyperbolic emulation. His character Jack Crabb claims to be 111 years old; I decided to confer relative immortality on my Gregório by making him claim that successive reincarnations keep him continuously alive throughout Brazil’s history. Berger’s narrative camera panned across 19th-century America, concentrating on the West; I focussed upon nearly five hundred years of Brazilian history and made its geography from the Amazon to the Plate the stage for my action. A comparative reading of the two texts will reveal other points of confluence and divergence.

Now, even when one begins by emulating a writer one admires, there’s always an unconscious inclination of one’s own self that directs one elsewhere. Two years before I began working on my novel about Brazil, I had published an autobiography titled Confessions of a Native-Alien, which telling the story of being uprooted from one’s native land places one in the condition of the mythical wanderer who, re-enacting the old parable of Adam cast out of paradise, remains an exile even when a new land provides the illusion of being a secure home. When I first conceived The Incredible Brazilian as a trilogy and sub-titled the first volume ‘The Native’, my intention was to title the second ‘The Alien’ and the third ‘The Native-Alien’. But, of course, the act of writing has another dynamic directing it whereby when one commits oneself to a piece of action then one is obliged to bring it to a conclusion and any prior plan one might have devised for the plot undergoes revision.

In this, the writing of fiction mirrors the labyrinthine procedure of everyday life whereby a spontaneous decision to turn left instead of the usual right on the road one routinely travels takes one to an unusual delight or a tragic outcome — or just plain boring nothingness. Thus, the second and third volumes of my trilogy ended with different titles and contain matter spontaneously invented because at the moment of writing it seemed either the appropriate action for the context or an expression, whether appropriate or not, of which the phrasing that my typing fingers had suddenly sent to the page had a pleasing cadence.

Art does not attempt to represent truth, no language can do that; art creates a provisional truth by positing new definitions through a rearrangement of the style of expression: we are either convinced by a set of linguistic propositions that they have constructed a believable reality or frustrated that all the words we have struggled to squeeze out of our brains are merely the repetition of conventional banality.

Despite the intrusions dictated by the unconscious impulse to thread a private native-alien experience in the elaborate tapestry of the Brazilian narrative as well as by the stylistic distractions that tugged at my imagination while writing the trilogy, of course I made certain that the historical context was impeccably correct. When the first volume was published, I received a letter from a Brazilian historian telling me he had checked the historical matter in my novel and found it faultless. My Brazilian publisher sent another of his writers, the famous Jorge Amado, a copy of the translated first volume; Amado wrote back asking who the Brazilian author was behind the funny pseudonym, for he didn’t believe a foreigner could have written the book. While such incidental praise is gratifying, what such comments show is that readers see in a text mostly an extension of their view of the world and very little of what the words signify. Had the historian looked closely, he would have found very little real history in my novel: all I had done was to use some images and highlight a few historical facts early in the novel to create a persuasive illusion of a former century so that the reader then becomes an active collaborator and, appreciating what follows only as a representation of that time and its customs, is satisfied that he has read a historical novel. But impressed to distraction by the historical content, the reader barely notices that what has held his interest and reinforced his conviction is not the history but the novelist’s inventively exploiting that history to give a seemingly unchallengeable credence to his fictional character’s adventures.

But neither scrupulous historical veracity nor the most extravagant invention can calm the agitated self and its ceaseless clamour for attention. The objective imagery through which a story is projected is but a camouflage: behind that elaborately worked pattern of words which make the writer invisible, as if he wore a tribal mask, is the writer’s tormented self, a ghostly presence unnoticed even by the writer himself.

It happened that needing to re-read my books some 30 years later for new editions I was struck by the recurring image of the outcast hero looking with longing and regret at a beautiful landscape which he may not enter: there he is in the closing lines of The Murder of Aziz Khan, dispossessed of his land, doomed to see it from outside the fence built to keep him out; there again repeatedly in the trilogy, most conspicuously at the close of the second volume where he is being transported as a criminal on a ship that sails along the coast of Brazil so that, chained on the deck, he sees the beautiful country from which he has been uprooted; and there he is as the Voyager in the prose poem with which the trilogy ends.

And whatever might have been the initiating impulse that makes a novelist take on the formidable task of studying the political and social history with which to create an authentic background from which the slightest anachronism must be excluded, a formal design asserts itself obliging one to fulfil a strict structural pattern. Historical truth is no more than a mechanical cloning of facts to enliven that background: it is the pattern projected by the unreliable imagination which is driven to forge a new style to give that design a brilliant sheen of flamboyant inventiveness, which transmits that encoded, but unexpressed, meaning throbbing beneath the surface of the words that enter the reader’s consciousness as an intuition of truth.