by Mike Gray

The theme of novels and plays is individual man as he lives, feels, and acts, and not anonymous collective wholes. The milieu is the background of the portraits the author paints; it is the state of external affairs to which the characters respond by moves and acts. There is no such thing as a novel or play whose hero is an abstract concept such as a race, a nation, a caste, or a political party. Man alone is the perennial subject of literature: individual, real man as he lives and acts. — Ludwig von Mises

Mises is anxious to disentangle the attributes of fiction from those inherent in historical research:

It is a hopeless task to interpret a symphony, a painting, or a novel. The interpreter at best tries to tell us something about his reaction to the work. He cannot tell us with certainty what the creator’s meaning was or what other people may see in it. Even if the creator himself provides a commentary on his work, as in the case of program music, this uncertainty remains. There are no words to describe the ineffable.

Despite a pre-existing commonality between fiction and history, they are not congruent:

What history and fiction have in common is the fact that both are based on knowledge concerning the human mind. They operate with thymological experience. Their method of approach is the specific understanding of human valuations, of the way people react to the challenge of their natural and social environment. But then their ways part. What the historian has to tell is completely expressed in his report. He communicates to the reader all he has established. His message is exoteric. There is nothing that would go beyond the content of his book as intelligible to competent readers.

Mises’s article on Mises Daily (“History and Fiction”) is actually a chapter from his book Theory and History, available on Amazon.com.