Great question! The idea of all historical narrative being fictive makes sense to me. I also love how meta Mantel is about history and the past in Wolf Hall—the final passages of the first volume about England constantly remaking itself, and putting words like stones in the rattling mouths of the dead, will always stick with me.
“But the trouble is, the maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills unto most…
“It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skull are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.”
By writing and reading historical fiction, I feel it’s a way of relating one’s modern self, with modern views and understanding, to people who’s society did not provide the environment to live the same way. The Outlander novels and television show display this conflict when Claire, a woman who lived in 1960s America and attended medical school, time travels to 1700s America and encounters slavery first hand. The reader/viewer contemplates how if they were posed with the same situation, how they would react.
Another aspect that I enjoy is the hero’s journey when that hero may have some very different beliefs from what is considered acceptable today.
A lot of SF time travel novels are exactly about that, feeling morally superior to "those people," and often changing the past, for better or worse. Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court being one of the first of those, and rarely surpassed.
You raise a good point. We all would like to think that we would different if we lived in those times when in almost certainty we would have been exactly the same. It’s not easy to come to terms with the fact that we would have believed and behaved the same way.
Thank you so much for this - as someone who writes hist fic, and teaching/writes about the writing of it, it's very useful as well as fascinating and if I may I'll be referring to it in the short course I'm teaching next month. FWIW, in my PhD, which was about why/how we write and read hist fic, and the writing of my own novel A Secret Alchemy, I said this (with apologies for the PhD language)
“It is no coincidence that Atwood’s definition of fiction, as the place ‘where individual memory and experience and collective memory and experience come together, in greater or lesser proportions’, might also be a definition of humanity’s experience of its own history. From the first utterance of ‘once upon a time’ individual humans have been mapping other individual and collective experiences onto their own, and by that means refiguring their own consciousness of existence.
That refigured consciousness, of course, includes a refigured collective memory from which we form part of our sense of self. If human existence is inherently storied, as Kearney suggests, then some of those stories reach back beyond our individual lives by means of the chain of collective memory and history-telling. However unstable the definitions, historical fiction inhabits the intersection of history (‘what is already there’* in the world) and fiction (‘what is not yet (but is potentially)’).
Perhaps uniquely among genres, it operates under tensions exerted by these two different narrative traditions and principles, which present formidable challenges to the writer. But I would argue that it is precisely because of its position on what some historians and critics would regard as disputed territory, its double-duality of ‘not only then but also now’ and ‘not only veracity but also possibility’, that historical fiction is uniquely constituted to recreate the coming-together of individual and collective experience.”
"two different narrative traditions and principles." Yes, I think that this is a particular problem for writers of historical fiction--that the modern novel as a form is the product of modern consciousness. This creates a real challenge for the writer treating earlier periods; they really have to rethink the form.
I think that's very true. Certainly finding the right voice for any historical fiction gets abruptly more difficult once you're back beyond Defoe et al., because the novel is the first form which is trying to represent conversational speech by ordinary(ish) people sort-of naturalistically. (It's not, perhaps, a coincidence that OED gives the first written examples of e.g. "don't" and "won't" as around the same date, in dialogue/plays etc., though common sense tells us that speakers have always contracted and elided things.)
The opposite view (say, see Julian Barnes on writing Arthur and George) is that we're writing modern novels - which work in modern ways for modern readers - *about* the past. Which is a rather different thing from wanting the novel to seem, somehow, to be the product of the past, at least for as long as the writer can keep us suspending our disbelief.
I think about these issues all the time as someone who has written historical fiction and is continuing to attempt it. I love the idea of a phenomenology of the past--it's a great way to think about it. I think the tools of the historical novelist and the historian are complementary--both require leaps of imagination, but only one requires footnotes. I'm in the middle of The Name of the Rose which seems to be thoroughly rooted in these questions. I also highly recommend Hild by Nicola Griffith if you haven't yet encountered it. Absolutely brilliant medieval historical fiction. The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett are certainly more high Romance than Mantel, and yet she seems to me to be a clear antecedent. I also adore and continue to read Judith Merkle Riley, who though much lighter, has a knack of making me understand mindsets of the past--she makes you believe that they believed, if that makes any sense. I think that's probably the mark of any good work of historical fiction: no matter how abstruse and irrelevant the conflicts seem to my modern mindset, I still understand their urgency and why they mattered.
Thank you! Yes, I loved Hild and may write about it at some point. I've never been able to get into Dunnett, though I'm sure the fault is mine rather than hers, since so many people whom I respect enjoy her work. I'm not familiar with Riley but will seek her out.
First of all, I LOVE this stack. The timing for me is wonderful, too, as I’ve been re-watching all the “Emma” movie/tv versions and drawn into very similar thoughts, especially about the men’s clothing, which seems even more constraining than the women’s. At the famous picnic, they complain about the heat, while buttoned up to the chin in stifling vests and neckpieces. And I wondered what kinds of investments in self, manhood, class must there be to abide by, to accept as normal, such a tension between comfort and presentation. So different from our own culture, in which we are constantly deluged with enticements for “soft,” “breathable” clothing. So much to think about!! And loved that you are thinking about it too. And thanks so much for the callout to my work!
This comment here made me think about two lines of dialogue, which I'm sure you'll recognize from your recent "Emma" rewatches:
>"So okay, I don't want to be a traitor to my generation and all, but I don't get how guys dress today. I mean, come on, it looks like they just fell out of bed and put on some baggy pants and take their greasy hair - ew - and cover it up with a backwards cap and we're supposed to swoon? I don't think so."
>"I know it sounds mental, but sometimes I have more fun vegging out than when I go partying. Maybe because my party clothes are so binding."
(There is a LOT of dialogue about clothes in that movie — much more than I remembered! And perhaps more than one would normally find in a "period" Austen adaptation? If so, this would be yet another feature of "Clueless" that keeps it much more faithful to the spirit of Austen's novels than most screen versions.)
For my money, having just re-watched all except the very first black and white version (have to dig that up somewhere) “Clueless” is still the best adaptation of “Emma.” The worst: Gwyneth Paltrow one. So stiff!!
Thanks for this compelling and thought provoking post. I'll look into the Phillips book and Tyll.
I'm doing Simon Haisell's slow read of the Mantel trilogy. It is indeed hard to inhabit the past. With the Mantel trilogy, I struggle to understand that the religious controversies were deadly real and not symbolic or a pretext for politics and lust. The question, for example, of who is resident in or headed to heaven, hell, or purgatory was not a symbolic question. Hard to wrap my modern brain around that.
Even in studying history and trying to understand why people acted as they did, it is extraordinarily difficult to rid yourself of hindsight bias. Appeasement is perhaps the best modern example of that.
Yes, these questions were not metaphors but very real. I think that Mantel's use of present tense and free-indirect discourse makes identification with these alien perspectives possible. I think you'll love Tyll; it's really a great book. I like the Phillips book too, though I don't think it's quite on the same level.
The only 'reality TV' that I ever enjoyed were the ones where people inhabited the past: 1900 House, Frontier House. There are apparently many more that I haven't seen.
So much that is so good here, John, so many essential issues.
"The most talented historical novelists create, if not a phenomenology of the past, then at least a hypothesis of one—a hypothesis of a phenomenology that strips away the elements of the modern self that tie us so firmly to our present moment and attempts to bring us back to the historical body."
The attempt to to truly imagine a past human experience is a humble endeavour, I think: it's impossible to do it, but it's a noble thing to try. As a reader, immersing oneself in an imagined, fictional past world is so much more exciting to the senses than a dry textbook, it 'brings history alive'. Consider Mantel's obsession with texture: food, textiles, hair, skin etc. The body, indeed.
"If the writer does not pose this question deliberately, then we are left, indeed, with a costume drama, which essentially teleports modern psychologies and ways of being and thinking to the past in order to look around and live there for a while."
This, exactly, is why I have little patience for so much lazy historical fiction, including TV renditions: one of my major beefs with the Wolf Hall TV series was that they cast every single female character according to modern beauty standards. Small bikkies, but the way these people looked is known historical fact.
The reason history is so seditious is that it functions as hard proof that systems and ideas we tend to consider as logical and universal are, in fact, no such thing.
Yes, the first scene in Mantel's novel is visceral and bodily, which serves to make the reader imagine the past in sensory terms beyond the scenery. I noted that as well about the casting of the TV series, though the acting was on such a high level that it didn't bother me much. I appreciated the fact that the lighting of the show was realistic, compared to most brightly lit historical television dramas.
American philosopher Jennifer Michael Hecht, in her book The Happiness Myth, proposes that we can become happier by trying to understand that our modern ideas are just as wack and arbitrary as those of any past society we look back on with shock and scorn.
Thanka for this John, and thanks for reminding me about Tyll. A fabulous book. I'd love to hear your thoughts coming out of this year's conversations. Lots to think about. Great historical fiction seems to grasp that a certain time and place has its own set of pasts and futures that are alien to our own. Cromwell's England is not just the Tudors, but about Arthur and Brutus, old wounds and an old world, and then something new, which isn't our world, but a set of visions seen by men and women living through the 1530s. Reading and writing about that time and place perhaps makes us consider our own times differently – where we are now becomes both less and more remarkable.
Great question! The idea of all historical narrative being fictive makes sense to me. I also love how meta Mantel is about history and the past in Wolf Hall—the final passages of the first volume about England constantly remaking itself, and putting words like stones in the rattling mouths of the dead, will always stick with me.
“But the trouble is, the maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills unto most…
“It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skull are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.”
Exactly, and these words reach out to the reader, who is participating in the same chase.
By writing and reading historical fiction, I feel it’s a way of relating one’s modern self, with modern views and understanding, to people who’s society did not provide the environment to live the same way. The Outlander novels and television show display this conflict when Claire, a woman who lived in 1960s America and attended medical school, time travels to 1700s America and encounters slavery first hand. The reader/viewer contemplates how if they were posed with the same situation, how they would react.
Another aspect that I enjoy is the hero’s journey when that hero may have some very different beliefs from what is considered acceptable today.
A lot of SF time travel novels are exactly about that, feeling morally superior to "those people," and often changing the past, for better or worse. Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court being one of the first of those, and rarely surpassed.
You raise a good point. We all would like to think that we would different if we lived in those times when in almost certainty we would have been exactly the same. It’s not easy to come to terms with the fact that we would have believed and behaved the same way.
Yes, historical fiction is a reminder that selfhood is a cultural creation.
I envy your students— the course sounds wonderful!
Ditto. I'm green with envy.
Thank you so much for this - as someone who writes hist fic, and teaching/writes about the writing of it, it's very useful as well as fascinating and if I may I'll be referring to it in the short course I'm teaching next month. FWIW, in my PhD, which was about why/how we write and read hist fic, and the writing of my own novel A Secret Alchemy, I said this (with apologies for the PhD language)
“It is no coincidence that Atwood’s definition of fiction, as the place ‘where individual memory and experience and collective memory and experience come together, in greater or lesser proportions’, might also be a definition of humanity’s experience of its own history. From the first utterance of ‘once upon a time’ individual humans have been mapping other individual and collective experiences onto their own, and by that means refiguring their own consciousness of existence.
That refigured consciousness, of course, includes a refigured collective memory from which we form part of our sense of self. If human existence is inherently storied, as Kearney suggests, then some of those stories reach back beyond our individual lives by means of the chain of collective memory and history-telling. However unstable the definitions, historical fiction inhabits the intersection of history (‘what is already there’* in the world) and fiction (‘what is not yet (but is potentially)’).
Perhaps uniquely among genres, it operates under tensions exerted by these two different narrative traditions and principles, which present formidable challenges to the writer. But I would argue that it is precisely because of its position on what some historians and critics would regard as disputed territory, its double-duality of ‘not only then but also now’ and ‘not only veracity but also possibility’, that historical fiction is uniquely constituted to recreate the coming-together of individual and collective experience.”
*Kearney, Richard, On Stories, p.132
"two different narrative traditions and principles." Yes, I think that this is a particular problem for writers of historical fiction--that the modern novel as a form is the product of modern consciousness. This creates a real challenge for the writer treating earlier periods; they really have to rethink the form.
I think that's very true. Certainly finding the right voice for any historical fiction gets abruptly more difficult once you're back beyond Defoe et al., because the novel is the first form which is trying to represent conversational speech by ordinary(ish) people sort-of naturalistically. (It's not, perhaps, a coincidence that OED gives the first written examples of e.g. "don't" and "won't" as around the same date, in dialogue/plays etc., though common sense tells us that speakers have always contracted and elided things.)
The opposite view (say, see Julian Barnes on writing Arthur and George) is that we're writing modern novels - which work in modern ways for modern readers - *about* the past. Which is a rather different thing from wanting the novel to seem, somehow, to be the product of the past, at least for as long as the writer can keep us suspending our disbelief.
I think about these issues all the time as someone who has written historical fiction and is continuing to attempt it. I love the idea of a phenomenology of the past--it's a great way to think about it. I think the tools of the historical novelist and the historian are complementary--both require leaps of imagination, but only one requires footnotes. I'm in the middle of The Name of the Rose which seems to be thoroughly rooted in these questions. I also highly recommend Hild by Nicola Griffith if you haven't yet encountered it. Absolutely brilliant medieval historical fiction. The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett are certainly more high Romance than Mantel, and yet she seems to me to be a clear antecedent. I also adore and continue to read Judith Merkle Riley, who though much lighter, has a knack of making me understand mindsets of the past--she makes you believe that they believed, if that makes any sense. I think that's probably the mark of any good work of historical fiction: no matter how abstruse and irrelevant the conflicts seem to my modern mindset, I still understand their urgency and why they mattered.
Thank you! Yes, I loved Hild and may write about it at some point. I've never been able to get into Dunnett, though I'm sure the fault is mine rather than hers, since so many people whom I respect enjoy her work. I'm not familiar with Riley but will seek her out.
First of all, I LOVE this stack. The timing for me is wonderful, too, as I’ve been re-watching all the “Emma” movie/tv versions and drawn into very similar thoughts, especially about the men’s clothing, which seems even more constraining than the women’s. At the famous picnic, they complain about the heat, while buttoned up to the chin in stifling vests and neckpieces. And I wondered what kinds of investments in self, manhood, class must there be to abide by, to accept as normal, such a tension between comfort and presentation. So different from our own culture, in which we are constantly deluged with enticements for “soft,” “breathable” clothing. So much to think about!! And loved that you are thinking about it too. And thanks so much for the callout to my work!
Thanks, Susan! It's thrilling for me to have you read this, since your work has had such an influence on mine.
This comment here made me think about two lines of dialogue, which I'm sure you'll recognize from your recent "Emma" rewatches:
>"So okay, I don't want to be a traitor to my generation and all, but I don't get how guys dress today. I mean, come on, it looks like they just fell out of bed and put on some baggy pants and take their greasy hair - ew - and cover it up with a backwards cap and we're supposed to swoon? I don't think so."
>"I know it sounds mental, but sometimes I have more fun vegging out than when I go partying. Maybe because my party clothes are so binding."
(There is a LOT of dialogue about clothes in that movie — much more than I remembered! And perhaps more than one would normally find in a "period" Austen adaptation? If so, this would be yet another feature of "Clueless" that keeps it much more faithful to the spirit of Austen's novels than most screen versions.)
For my money, having just re-watched all except the very first black and white version (have to dig that up somewhere) “Clueless” is still the best adaptation of “Emma.” The worst: Gwyneth Paltrow one. So stiff!!
John,
Thanks for this compelling and thought provoking post. I'll look into the Phillips book and Tyll.
I'm doing Simon Haisell's slow read of the Mantel trilogy. It is indeed hard to inhabit the past. With the Mantel trilogy, I struggle to understand that the religious controversies were deadly real and not symbolic or a pretext for politics and lust. The question, for example, of who is resident in or headed to heaven, hell, or purgatory was not a symbolic question. Hard to wrap my modern brain around that.
Even in studying history and trying to understand why people acted as they did, it is extraordinarily difficult to rid yourself of hindsight bias. Appeasement is perhaps the best modern example of that.
Yes, these questions were not metaphors but very real. I think that Mantel's use of present tense and free-indirect discourse makes identification with these alien perspectives possible. I think you'll love Tyll; it's really a great book. I like the Phillips book too, though I don't think it's quite on the same level.
The only 'reality TV' that I ever enjoyed were the ones where people inhabited the past: 1900 House, Frontier House. There are apparently many more that I haven't seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_reality_television_series
There was a great series on farming in various eras, "Victorian Farm," "Tudor Farm," etc. Those are worth watching.
Sounds like a wonderful class - glad you are bringing the discussions here, and looking forward to more!
So much that is so good here, John, so many essential issues.
"The most talented historical novelists create, if not a phenomenology of the past, then at least a hypothesis of one—a hypothesis of a phenomenology that strips away the elements of the modern self that tie us so firmly to our present moment and attempts to bring us back to the historical body."
Thanks, Jay. I imagine that you have been contemplating some of these issues as you work on your book.
Indeed, I have.
The attempt to to truly imagine a past human experience is a humble endeavour, I think: it's impossible to do it, but it's a noble thing to try. As a reader, immersing oneself in an imagined, fictional past world is so much more exciting to the senses than a dry textbook, it 'brings history alive'. Consider Mantel's obsession with texture: food, textiles, hair, skin etc. The body, indeed.
"If the writer does not pose this question deliberately, then we are left, indeed, with a costume drama, which essentially teleports modern psychologies and ways of being and thinking to the past in order to look around and live there for a while."
This, exactly, is why I have little patience for so much lazy historical fiction, including TV renditions: one of my major beefs with the Wolf Hall TV series was that they cast every single female character according to modern beauty standards. Small bikkies, but the way these people looked is known historical fact.
The reason history is so seditious is that it functions as hard proof that systems and ideas we tend to consider as logical and universal are, in fact, no such thing.
Yes, the first scene in Mantel's novel is visceral and bodily, which serves to make the reader imagine the past in sensory terms beyond the scenery. I noted that as well about the casting of the TV series, though the acting was on such a high level that it didn't bother me much. I appreciated the fact that the lighting of the show was realistic, compared to most brightly lit historical television dramas.
Yes! The darkness of the past. I liked that the rooms were smallish, and things were made of wood, it was an older idea of grandeur
American philosopher Jennifer Michael Hecht, in her book The Happiness Myth, proposes that we can become happier by trying to understand that our modern ideas are just as wack and arbitrary as those of any past society we look back on with shock and scorn.
Thanka for this John, and thanks for reminding me about Tyll. A fabulous book. I'd love to hear your thoughts coming out of this year's conversations. Lots to think about. Great historical fiction seems to grasp that a certain time and place has its own set of pasts and futures that are alien to our own. Cromwell's England is not just the Tudors, but about Arthur and Brutus, old wounds and an old world, and then something new, which isn't our world, but a set of visions seen by men and women living through the 1530s. Reading and writing about that time and place perhaps makes us consider our own times differently – where we are now becomes both less and more remarkable.
Thanks, Simon. I'll certainly be writing about Tyll later this summer.
I look forward to hearing about the conversation.