Back to the Body, part two

The "body-not-body" in historical fiction

Dear reader:

While I get myself back on track with our promised reading projects in this busiest part of the semester, in the wreckage and wake of last week’s devastating election, I will share with you some of what I’ve been working on lately in my academic life. This post is a part of the introduction to my current book project and is a continuation of my piece entitled “Back to the Body,” which appeared in this space in June. I suggest starting with the earlier piece if you haven’t read it. This seems timely, since the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light began broadcasting in the UK this week, so this piece may also be of interest to followers of

Simon Haisell

’s slow read of Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy.

Programming note: we will continue with our long-delayed reading of Gulliver’s Travels next week. Starting in January, we will embark on an extended reading of the major works of Chaucer, in conjunction with a course that I will be teaching at my university. Our reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, originally scheduled for this fall, will appear as a supplement to the Chaucerian reading next spring.

Yours,

John

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In the opening pages of Georg Lukács's classic study, The Historical Novel, he locates the beginnings of the genre with Walter Scott and asserts that "what is lacking in the so-called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely and specifically the historical, that is, derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age" (19). According to this criterion, much supposed historical fiction after Scott fails this test as well. (And indeed, for Lukács, in the course of the nineteenth century, the genre is simply absorbed into realism—distinct from the historical romance or the adventure story.) The sympathetic characters, for example, in Ken Follett's vastly entertaining, meticulously researched The Pillars of the Earth, which dramatizes the building of a Gothic cathedral in medieval England, seem to share many of the values of and to think like late-twentieth-century liberals. The effect of Follett's novel is something like time-travel for those who share such values, to feel oneself transported onto a medieval stage in order to identify with a character much like oneself in terms of sensibilities. It depends on the interaction of familiarity and alterity, but the alterity must never, ultimately, become alienating to the reader, or else the fantasy will be broken. Perhaps this participatory quality explains the successful adaptation of Follett's novel into a role-playing computer game.

Conversely, the sort of reading experience that Lukács posits depends upon the alienation of the modern reader—upon the defamiliarization of selfhood. The reader must feel the difference, not only from modern physical and technological conditions, but also from the very experience of being human. It is difficult for a writer to produce this effort successfully, especially since the very literary form of the modern novel is a product of modern subjectivity. The process is similar to that of the "world building" of fantasy novelists, who must construct not only the physical world in which their narratives play out, but also the values, assumptions, religious sensibilities, and psychologies that might be possible in such a world. In their way, characters of this kind of historical fiction may be as strange to modern readers as are Tolkien's hobbits—indeed more so, since hobbits were products of a modern imagination that drew upon a modern ideal of a pastoral past.

Since these sorts of narrative depend so much on the difference between the modern and the pre-modern, some of the most interesting historical fiction of this type explores the period or periods of transition between the pre-modern and the modern. Depending on how we define modernity, these periods may range from the late Middle Ages through the early nineteenth century. This has been fruitful territory for historical novelists in recent decades, largely because the concatenation of the familiar and the alien becomes more possible through the relative proximity to modernity. In fact, I will argue that the task of the historical novelist becomes less difficult if they are writing about a period after the modern novel has already developed, since in these eras (beginning, say, in the early nineteenth century), novels of the time can provide psychological and stylistic models. Jane Austen, for example, obviously had a profound influence on the fiction of Patrick O'Brian, since Austen was writing about what Bakhtin would call O'Brian's "chronotope," or at least something quite close to it, and she provides a sense of the ways in which a character might think, feel, and express thoughts and ideas, and she provides a model historical prose style. Those writers who set their narratives in earlier periods must either rethink the very form of the novel or else give way entirely to tonal anachronism.

While the dashing Russell Crowe brought Hollywood glamor to the film version, Patrick O’Brian’s novels of Nelson’s navy owe much of their atmosphere to the influence of Jane Austen.

Historical novels on earlier periods must find a way into the literary "space" of the novel as a form. Some accomplish this through defamiliarizing language, which is risky and often unconvincing, while others manipulate the novelistic form or construct a narrative frame. But this kind of self-consciousness in some form is necessary in order to avoid what Lukács identifies as a tendency to accept a modern perspective on the past, or any fictional setting, "naively as something given" (19).

This kind of self-conscious approach to fictionalizing earlier ears, these efforts to construct a hypothetical phenomenology of the past, are, I will argue, analogous to Foucault's great, lifelong project to write a history of the self through his various studies of discipline, sexuality, and taxonomical discourse. This is partly, of course, because the entire process of producing fiction might be summarized as the creating of the self through discourse; Foucault's project, on the other hand, might crudely be summarized as a history of converting the body and the self into discourse. In fact, to construe a body as a self in the first place is to convert the body into discourse—which is an idea that is central to all of Foucault's work.

By proposing this analogy, I do not mean to suggest that Foucault's work has had a significant influence on these writers. (In fact, I do not know of a single instance in which any of the writers that I study here have referred to Foucault at all, in print or otherwise.) Rather, I will argue that the analogy is a productive way to consider the the literary project of historical fiction, especially historical fiction that considers the transition to modernity: that it might act as a kind of thought experiment that considers the "genealogy" of subjectivity, or the ways in which people in the past may have deployed discourse to construct selves out of their perceptions of their bodies and minds in the context of their environments. Furthermore, I believe that the struggle to construct a self is partly a result of the alienation of the mind from the body that is explicit in the modern, Cartesian vision of a divided subjectivity. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault writes of an essential reality of this post-Cartesian state: "Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.” If we mentally edit this language for gender inclusivity, as we should, then this becomes an even richer claim, as gender, of course, is a central aspect of the discourse of the self. Considered from this perspective, historical fiction becomes a much more complex endeavor than a typical costume drama might suggest.

In this book project, I will consider how a handful of writers of historical fiction have framed the relationship between the self and the body during the transition to modernity in the British Isles and Northern Europe. While it is the work of Foucault on this subject that provides the initial framing for this study, it will also draw upon a variety of other critical lenses—for example, scholarship on historical fiction and historiography from Lukács to more recent work by Hayden White, Linda Hutcheon, and Frederic Jameson; theoretical work on ecocriticism and animal studies; Bakhtin's ideas on discourse and the form of the novel; and other theoretical work on the history of the body by

Susan Bordo

and others. This complex succession of lenses reflects the complexity of the subject. I will treat these writers in reverse chronological order of the periods about which they write, both to deconstruct any sort of teleological notion and to demonstrate that imagining subject perspectives becomes more elusive the further we get from modernity, and this requires our writers to grapple with the problem of the novel's modernity as a form—a form that seems designed for modern notions of selfhood. The more ancient the body, the more distant it seems to us, but the body remains the most familiar site for our imaginings of the past: we understand physical sensation, we have the same five senses, the same arrangement of arms and legs as our ancestors. But though this is true, the body does not exist in a vacuum, and the difficulty in imagining the historical body derives from how it was perceived and represented, how it desired and was desired, how its relationship to the mind was understood, how it was mapped and explored, how it interacted with others and with its contextual ecologies.

At several crucial moments in this book I coin an apparently imprecise but flexible and useful term: "body-not-body." At its most basic level, I use it as shorthand for the physicality of the body paired with the discourses, symbology, and ornaments that accompany it, the "not-body." Entirely fictional characters are "not-bodies," but many characters in historical fiction (and in historical narratives more generally) are body-not-bodies; that is, they are constructions of discourse that at one point in the past had a physical body upon which these constructions are based. But the not-body can also refer to all of the discourse that fills in for the absent physical body—the novelist's fictionalizing of an historical body, the coroner's report, the historian's sourcing—all of the types of discourse that depend upon an often absent physical body, or at least upon the idea of such a body. I say "often absent," because these discourses can exist in the presence of the physical body as well, for example, in the royal fiction of what Kantorowicz calls "the king's two bodies," one of which is physical and present, and one of which is abstract and eternal. But in the realm of historical fiction, the body's connection to the not-body is more strained and problematic, because we do not have access to the physical body—a circumstance which is both a challenge and a blessing to the writer of historical fiction, who depends upon the readers' desire for knowledge of the historical body but who has access only to the not-body, as well as the fact that the writers have bodies themselves, as do the readers, and this existential state must be the means through which to preserve the body-not-body connection, or to imagine it, at whatever distance. This term owes much to Foucault's project of tracing the history of the conversion of the body into discourse, but it also depends much upon the idea that historical fiction aims, at least in part, to reverse this process, to sort through the discourse in order at least to imagine what it felt like to be a certain body in a certain time and place that is distant from our own.

The concept of “the King’s two bodies” owes much to medieval Christian theology, as well as to Neo-Platonic philosophy.

In Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Cromwell considers the records of jousting tournaments of the past:

There is a correspondence between the score sheet and the human body, in that the paper has divisions marked off, for the head and the torso. A touch on the breastplate is recorded, but not fractured ribs. A touch on the helm is recorded, but not a cracked skull. You can pick up the score sheets afterwards and read back a record of the day, but the marks on paper do not tell you about the pain of a broken ankle or the efforts of a suffocating man not to vomit inside his helmet. As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there. (163)

This of one of many subtly meta-fictional moments in Mantel's writing, in which she herself is attempting to convert the coded discourse of bodies, the not-bodies of the past, into an imagining of the actual body, which, despite her best efforts, will always remain not-body. But the difference between Mantel's discourse and the discourses from which she is working is that it recognizes the readerly desire to unify the body-not-body, as well as the readerly knowledge that this desire can never be fulfilled. The historical body is at once familiar and alien.

That readerly desire to unite the alien with the familiar is the reason that historical narratives exist.

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Here is a link to part one:

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Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Daniil Silantev on Unsplash