“Were they like us?”: writing historical fiction

This is a thorny issue, and it is probably foolhardy to undertake it. I suppose, to get a handle on it, we need to define our terrain quite carefully. In a sense, history is, quite simply, anything that happened before today. But that’s too broad to be of any analytical use. For the purposes of argument, I want to propose that history, for the creative writer, is anything in the generation prior to their own, and of course everything before that. So 30 years. Anything which is not familiar to you, anything that is not within your recognisable memory-horde, is history. So the dinosaurs, the Romans, the Plantaganets, the Victorians, the soldiers from D-Day, the Women’s Liberationists. They are history. They can be our material.

There are different ways of categorising that material, and the writer has to do that work, and then cover up the signs of their labour pretty carefully, or their writing will be documentarist and tedious. We need to dismiss at the outset any idea that the past can be accurately represented. No one can ever know how that past really was: and no literary device can approximate it. Lukacs, in his influential The Historical Novel (1937), argued that realism was the mode best suited to capture “true” history, and by realism I think he meant consonance: a fit between different discourses in the text, making the past seem “true” and “natural”. But this is not so. I think the past, in all its complexity, is best approximated by discursive dissonance. I’ll use this idea as a hook to hang my whole argument on: I want to argue that a language of disjuncture, rather than smoothness, will usher the reader most fruitfully into the past, its pleasures and pains. 

Explanatory models

Everything depends on the secret theories about history that the author holds. If they are wise, they hide them. A flinty Marxism lies beneath Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, for example, which argues covertly that economics are the determinant in the last instance on cultural and sexual life: but this rigorous theory is skilfully concealed, as we attend to the protagonists and their lives. Tolstoy’s War and Peace can best be understood as an attack on the “great man” theory of history: he argues, through giving access to the consciousness of Pierre, Natasha and Bolkonsky, that characters in the past had, as we have, fleeting and impermanent allegiances (like Pierre’s to Masonic ritual). Some historical novelists espouse the view that one emotion binds everyone together. In the case of Hilary Mantel, that emotion is greed and self-regard, but her Wolf Hall trilogy never makes that explicit. That is why the past she displays is so engaging and coherent. 

In all convincing historical fiction, there is an awareness what I call the “bustle-and-drag” process: that is to say, that the shocking and sudden events of the past (the French Revolution, the execution of Charles I, the sinking of the Titanic) have very long antecedences (roots) and even longer consequences (branches). The real art of historical fiction is to show how these roots and branches impact on individuals in an unpredictable way. That’s how the element of shock enters in. What the reader needs is to be both surprised and stimulated by the past. By its events, its inhabitants. And its objects. 

Objects

A great deal hinges on the horde of objets troves which the historical writer presents. Some historical novels are rather like The Antiques Roadshow: we are invited to view pelisses, clay pipes, toga rings, a fur rug. Often these are described in great detail, as though their very presence in the text will usher us straight into the past, with no problem. But it’s not as easy as that. I think that it might be more fruitful for the historical writer to create or present objects which have great symbolic resonance, ambiguity even. Such objects will (operating secretly, of course) put the reader into a fruitful quandary: was this how people felt about their things? What does people’s stuff tell us about them? Two sorts of people inhabited the past: those who were comfortable with the dominant modes of thought, and those who were not. The historical writer can use objects as a way of thinking that issue through.

An aumbry would provide a useful metaphor for thinking  about this. An aumbry is a cupboard built to fit a specific recess. There was a skill to its manufacture: the wooden interior was meant to emit something like a sigh as it slid into its appointed aperture. It had to be a tight fit. Aumbrys were made for churches, to hold the blessed pyx or the sacred oils. But they could also be found in houses with thick walls, a secure place made to hide precious objects or the domestic gods of the family. Aumbrys can help us to think about the way people lived in their own time. When folk fitted tightly into their prepared slot, there was no room for manoeuvre.  And that can help us to realise how some people could be  happy to be locked into the dominant thought-systems of their own time: they would seek for Osiris, they would sacrifice on the fields of Mars, they would believe in the Sacred Heart. And they were  fervent and orthodox. Such people did breathe and eat and labour: they were comfortable with the common sense of their time. But other people did not slide into their appointed slot. They were aumbrys that would never slide tight and true into a prepared space. Such men and women were awkward and imperfect, prickly and ramshackle, rebarbative and unorthodox. The misfits. It is the misfits who change the world. And the historical writer needs to distinguish between the tight and the loose aumbreys, and perhaps find different ways of valuing them and locating them in the historical process.

Empathy

 I wrote in my previous Blog (Making the Dead Speak) about the issue of empathy, and I need to return to this issue now with some urgency. I think that there is a sort of sentimental history that we need to avoid at all costs, even though it may have animpeccable pedigree. The historian E.P. Thompson, in his ground-breaking The Making of the English Working Class, said ” I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan ...  from the enormous condescension of posterity”. He wanted to give these people a voice: but he omitted to note that they had one already. It is up to us to disinter it, or if there is no record of it, to imagine one. And this is where the labour of the professional historian and the historical novelist are identical. 

It is commonly asserted  that there is a sort of cognitive empathy in both social and cultural interaction, and that this is desirable in both. But it isn’t. It’s crucial to be able to empathise with others in political situations: that sympathy fires us into action. But in cultural situations - such as the artistic creation of a past world - a degree of historical distance is crucial. The 1930s is as far away as the pyramids. The pacts, exchanges, touches, and emotions of the past are not ours. The creative writer needs, I think, to be an historian of consciousness, and the best way to do that is through the creation of a discourse that is not smooth, but which has gaps, dissonances and jaggedness.

Discourse

This is the trickiest issue.  We need to learn how to assess the language of the past, before we can produce one which is suitable for the job in hand. Dr Johnson insisted  in his Life  of Dryden that “to judge rightly of an author, we must transport ourselves to his time, and  examine what were the wants of his contemporaries, and what were his means of supplying them. That which is  easy at one time was diffcult at  another.”  This is very suggestive. What Dr Johnson meant, I think, is that all authors, whether they like it or not, are in thrall to the market. It’s nothing so crude as an economic market - that you can  sell your wares only if they can be heard and understood by an audience. Rather, there is a market in discourse. That is to say, there is a  literary lingua franca in every period. This comprises the central frame of references of the culture: that which is neither too tedious nor too avant-garde, that which tells what everyone in the period knew. Historicity - the essential marker of that which is past, which is no longer there - is marked by a sense of strangeness. That is the moment what we see that the writer is other than us. And an assessment of their frame of reference is esential for the  retrospective construction of that strangeness.

The best way to focus on this is to compare texts about the same topic - for example,  of the most searing experience, the death of a child. Take Ben Jonson’s On My First Sonne, written in 1603:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy:

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.

Seven years tho’ wert lent to me and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage

And if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and ask’d, say,”Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

Compare that with William Wordsworth’s Surprised by Joy, written in 1815. 

Surprised by joy - impatient as the wind

I turned to share the transport - Oh! with whom

But thee, long buried in the silent tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind - 

But how could I forget thee? Through that power

Even for the least division of an hour,

Have I been so beguil’d as to be blind

To my most grievous loss? - that thought’s return

Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore

Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more:

that neither present times nor years unborn

Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

We see that Jonson’s discourse is shot through with a major conflict: between the normative Christian structures of redemption and rebirth, and a mercantilist ethic of debt and repayment. It is this dynamic which sets the poem in motion, and gives it its power. It is a discursive battleground in which (and this may be intentional) the conflict detracts from the emotional pain, and makes it bearable. With Wordsworth’s poem, the language is steeped in Romantic notions of the self, first articulated by Rousseau, which had broad currency in England in the period. This causes his preoccupation with his own technical virtuosity - the run-on lines, the long sentences, the management of breath, the unanswered questions. Wordsworth forces himself not to know: and that technical and epistemological maelstrom takes up his emotional energy, reducing his pain.

Now this discussion may seem a long away away from the issue of historical fiction, but it need not be. I want to argue that one way to write the past is to identify and reproduce the cultural conflicts extant in any one particular period. The discursive field of the protagonists should enact this conflict, make it visible, without alienating or discombobulating the reader. But the key issue here is language which seems out of joint. We ought to strive to avoid this at all costs when we write historical fiction. For example, Downton Abbey, scripted by Julian Fellowes, is full of historical bloopers which reduce the overall quality of the work: consider the scene when the lovelorn Matthew says to Lady Mary “I thought you’d gone off me!” or the scene where he calls another character “a big girl’s blouse”. These utterances could only have been made if the protagonist had been a verbal acrobat and leapt forward 90 years. The same practice occurs in Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, where a resolutely modern register obtains throughout.  Of course, to put very modern discourse into the mouths of historical characters does give them a modern relevance, but it distances the reader from the fact that the inhabitants of the past may have looked like us, but they neither felt, thought, or spoke like us. A sort of purism is not the answer though. To reproduce the grammatical tropes or performative style of the past might make a text sound authentic - lots of “Prithees” and “Sires” - but it makes for hard reading and for patchy identification. I think what seems best is an historically neutral  discourse, one not marked by undue modernity or historicity, which permits the emergence and examination of the conflicts and determinants of the past. Maggie O’Farrell does this in Hamnet. So does Thackeray in The History of Henry Esmond.

Writing historical fiction permits us to hear the denizens of the past, and engage in the fantasy that they can hear us too. It is, above all, an imaginative transaction. The dead do live on in culture, in language. They are like us. They are not like us. It is the cultural task of the historical novelist to bring this conflict to light, and to rejoice in its difficulty.