The historical novel can invent voices, dialogues and scenes. What then should he owe to the reader when he tells a documented past? In an interview published on 6 November 2026 in the Lebanese press, the critic Mostafa Atiya Gomaa defends freedom of imagination, while refusing to manipulate the established facts. In particular, he proposes to accompany the story with a list of references. The first pages of two novels,Ghassan’s daughterof Jurji Zaydan andSalammbôof Gustave Flaubert, allow to examine this border in concrete terms.
Gomaa describes a narrator able to shape events, places and characters. It distinguishes the description, the inscription in a historical culture and the use of documents. These functions can reinforce the impression of seeing the past. They also pose a difficulty: a convincing scene is not, for this reason alone, an attested fact.
His reference proposal therefore opens a practical debate. How to preserve the freedom of the narrative while allowing the reader to distinguish what comes from the documents? We must look at how the book builds this distinction, even in its opening and the accompanying pages.
The historical novel goes from collective to characters
InGhassan’s daughter, Jurji Zaydan begins with a chapter devoted to Ghasanid rulers. It presents their territory, their links with Byzantium and regional rivalries. The reader enters first into a historical presentation. This chapter gives the narrative a space, political powers and a succession of events.
The next chapter changes in scale. Hind, presented as the daughter of Jabala, appears through her taste for riding. Zaydan describes the palace, the race ground, the preparations for a competition and the reward promised to riders. Clothing, horses and gestures gradually replace the general picture.
This transition shows the novel’s own work. A collective setting becomes an experience lived by characters. The story organizes the waiting, makes the participants look towards the palace and prepares a scene. These choices of rhythm and point of view give a sensitive form to the time represented.
They do not exempt the distinction between the levels of the text. Political presentation, costume detail and intimate reaction do not necessarily rely on the same type of evidence. The narrator, however, links them in a continuous language. The reader must be able to recognize this difference without every sentence turning into a learned note.
At Zaydan, references already present
The edition ofGhassan’s daughterconsulted includes a list of books used for historical events. These include the stories of al-Tabari, Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khaldoun, andThe Book of Songsisfahani. The bibliography mentioned by Gomaa thus has a concrete example in the Arabic Romanesque tradition.
The preface of the second part also specifies the Zaydan project. The author writes this book in a series of novels devoted to the history of Islam, published successively in his magazine. It indicates the historical extent of the story and announces the continuation of the enterprise. The ambition to tell is explicitly accompanied by an ambition to transmit.
A list of works makes this work more visible. It allows to find the texts consulted and to extend the reading. But she does not say, alone, what page supports each detail. Nor does it specify how the author separated divergent accounts or built a conversation.
The presence of references therefore requires a second reading: to observe their use. A cited work may provide a chronology, place name, description or interpretation. These loans do not all have the same scope. The bibliography enlightens the making of the novel without automatically certifying each of its scenes.
Flaubert’s feast and Polybe’s story
OpeningSalammbôoffers another way to grasp this passage. Flaubert immediately places the reader in the Hamilcar gardens, in Carthage, in the middle of a banquet of soldiers. Food, languages, smells and objects occupy the scene. Then the question of unpaid balances reveals the political conflict behind the feast.
Polybe’s story, in book I of hisHistory, provides a precise point of comparison. In the passage dedicated to the return of mercenaries, Giscon organizes successive departures to allow their payment. The Carthaginian authorities, however, let them accumulate in the city, hoping to reduce the amount due. This historical nucleus also appears in Flaubert’s first chapter.
The novel turns him into a dramatic situation. Intoxication revives grievances, objects become grounds for contention and Salammbô enters the field of gaze. Flaubert thus organizes perceptions and tensions around the conflict. Comparing these pages to Polybe allows you to see what the story takes up and how it stages it.
This comparison remains limited to the passages examined. It is neither a control of all the details of the novel nor a global judgment on its historical fidelity. It shows above all why the quality of a scene and its documentary value must be assessed separately.
A note may specify the part of invention
The principle defended by Gomaa becomes more precise when we distinguish three operations: taking back an attested fact, proposing an interpretation and inventing a scene. An imagined dialogue can explore a character. A revamped chronology changes the relationship between events. A word attributed to a historical character can take the appearance of a testimony if nothing indicates its status.
A footnote can explain these choices without interrupting the narrative. It can identify created characters, condensed episodes and controversial points. The reader then retains the freedom to be carried by the narrative, and then to return to its construction.
In the examples examined, the work begins with a simple operation: open the documentary pages next to the first scenes. At Zaydan, the list of references offers this starting point. For the feast ofSalammbô, the passage of Polybe already allows to follow the transformation of a question of payment into a Romanesque conflict.
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