ducksanddrakes

At The Guardian, Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel mounts a powerful defense of the easily-mocked genre of historical fiction:

Use of the term is beginning to look like an accusation, a stick to beat writers with: you’re historical, you weaselly good-for-nothing, you luxury, you parasite. The accusation is that authors are ducking the tough issues in favour of writing about frocks. There is a certain strand of historical fiction of which this is certainly true; it is chick-lit with wimples. But that is not the kind of historical fiction that is under attack. It is too soft a target. The grumbling is aimed at literary fiction set in the past, which is accused of being, by its nature, escapist. It’s as if the past is some feathered sanctuary, a nest muffled from contention and the noise of debate, its events suffused by a pink, romantic glow.

Phooey.  As Mantel explains, historical events and mentalities are often “beyond the borders of what readers could bear,” and the most fascinating parts of the past are either necessarily inconceivable to the modern mind or inconceivably obscene (like, say, glowing wimples or pink feathery frocks), which is why historical fiction is so challenging to pull off with any panache.

Mantel sees through the condemnations.  The objection to historical fiction is really based on a lack of learning on the part of readers, not to mention an underlying contempt for history, and a misunderstanding of how it really motivates many readers:

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey. Immersion in history doesn’t make you backward-looking; it makes you want to run like hell towards the future.

Professional history is just so more complex than the critics suggest – not a painted backdrop but a kaleidoscope.  Any historian with a realistic idea of tenure will tell you that the more torsion they can apply to that optic, the longer they will last in the profession.  And curiously, the best historical writing is can survive massive upheavals in our account of historical fact.  This is the genre of choice for Walter Scott and Tolstoy, after all.  Of Shakespeare, for crying out loud.

Mantel drives her point home:

Once this is understood, the trade of the historical novelist doesn’t seem so reprehensible or dubious; the only requirement is for conjecture to be plausible and grounded in the best facts one can get. In any event, it is wrong for critics to be prescriptive about what the novelists of any generation should write. Most of their prescriptions are issued in deep ignorance of how a novel gets on to the page. A novelist doesn’t sit at the keyboard sucking her thumb, thinking “what next?” A novel arrives whether you want it or not. After months or years of silent travel by night, it squats like an illegal immigrant at Calais, glowering and plotting, thinking of a thousand ways to gain a foothold. It’s useless to try to keep it out. It’s smarter than you are. It’s upon you before you’ve seen its face, and has set up in business and bought a house.

What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that, when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don’t know which bits are true. So here is a handy pocket guide. Every time the author writes, “He thought that . . .” or “She felt that . . .”, she’s making it up. We never know what people thought or felt, unless they kept frank and full journals. And the world is full of people who lie to their own diaries.

Me, I’ve never seen the point in having a diary that you don’t lie to.  As a matter of fact, having a diary of any kind practically necessitates that you also keep a secret diary, in which you write details withheld from the official version, and a secret secret diary that is behind a false wall-panel in a condemned building and contains additional lies intended to mislead investigators after your mysterious disappearance – and so forth, until your life becomes grist for a Borges story.

But I digress.  Mantel’s analysis seems correct to me (well, the Calais immigrant is a little bit precious), but I am convinced that there is one more step to add to the argument.  As a matter of fact, historians need historical fiction.  The genre entices new students into the field, just as a field trip to the zoo is the first stage in the making of a great naturalist.  And without historical fiction to flesh out the world of the possible, the world of the actual becomes harder to frame.  Aristotle says that fiction is more philosophical than history, because contemplating the possible is a more rewarding intellectual activity than merely learning the actual.  If he is right, then without fiction to help widen the horizon of the imaginable, we loose sight of possibilities and deeper questions that might be used to innovate our historical narratives and lead to knowledge that is better and more supple – that larger truth that only emerges after seeing a distended fact for what it is.

In other words, not only does historical fiction dance along the colors of the shifting historical kaleidoscope, but it often helps generate questions that will help us turn the kaleidoscope around once more.

That’s one of the reasons that I am convinced there is an inherent value to using the past, recycling the past, restating the past, rephrasing the past – there is a righteousness to all patterns of sheer remembering that forestall the damnable finalization of human memory.  Those who do not repeat the past, you might say, are condemned to understand it.