Past Caring

In her Washington Post review of the book, Wendy Smith writes of Alan Cheuse's To Catch the Lightning:

The sketch of [its protagonist's] early adulthood at the turn of the 20th century is a skillful but standard portrait of an ambitious young man unsatisfied by his successful career and restless in domesticity. (His wife. . .is stereotyped as the spouse who Just Doesn't Understand.) When [Edward] Curtis takes one of his frequent walks along the beach to get away from the crowded Seattle household containing his mother, mother-in-law and sister-in-law as well as Clara and the kids, the ensuing epiphany also sounds familiar. He observes an Indian woman digging for clams and decides to take her photograph, a far cry from his professional, commercial portraits. "Their eyes met. Deep and deep and deeper -- he saw far into her foreign soul." The encounter with the Other is a fiction staple, and Cheuse follows a well-worn path in depicting a white man discovering a more authentic way of life in a nonwhite society.

While I would certainly agree with the reviewer's judgment of the novel--"standard," "stereotyped," and "familiar" are definitely terms I would use in characterizing it, although the word "ponderous" also seems appropriate as a way of describing its style and structure--I encounter very few "historical" novels that are not explicable in such terms. This one's a "true story" about Edward Curtis, a 19th century photographer whose chief claim to fame was his attempt to "document" the "fading way of life of the American Indian," as the book's jacket flap has it. Everything about it justifies Wendy Smith's conclusion that it trods a "well-worn path" in its depiction of a white man's sympathy for Indians, a feature of the novel that becomes obvious in just its first few pages and makes reading the whole of it (492 pages) laborious indeed.

In a review on this blog of Lilly Tuck's The News from Paraguay (which I found equally bland and banal), I professed uncertainty about "what the purpose of historical fiction is supposed to be. Merely to re-create the past? Why? It is, of course, interesting enough to discover what 'things were like' in the past, but what does reading a novel about the past--deliberately presented as 'about' the past--do for us that just reading well-researched history can't provide?" I'm no clearer now about the ultimate purpose of historical novels--at least about their literary purpose--than I was then, although fiction such as Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt (reviewed here) certainly does demonstrate that the historical past can be used for artistic purposes that have little to do with history per se, the attempt to pin down what "things were like" as an end in itself.

Like two of Cheuse's other novels, The Light Possessed, about Geogia O'Keefe, and The Bohemians, about John Reed, To Catch the Lightning focuses on a particular historical figure, so they could all perhaps be called biographical fictions rather than historical novels built around fictional characters. And to that point Cheuse himself has said of this work that he's doing a kind of history in reverse, that "historians usually work from the outside in, and novelists move in the other direction." But of course this is an absurd justification on the face of it. Historians work with materials actually at hand, are careful (usually) not to go beyond what the record can support. A novelist invents and supplements. Unless Cheuse has uncovered minutely detailed records of what the "characters" in his novel--at least those that aren't themselves mostly invented--really did say, think, feel, and do in all of the situations depicted, To Catch the Lightning can't really be compared to history writing at all, certainly not in the smug way in which Cheuse implies that his own moving "in the other direction" is in fact superior to the "outside in" approach of historians.

Yet a novel like this still unavoidably asks that it be taken as a contribution to historical discourse, an account of the life of Edward Curtis that goes beyond what mere history could provide and thus illuminates such an historical personage and his times even more fully. And, in a period when "serious" novelists are turning to historical fictions in what seems to me unprecedented numbers (all five of the 2008 National Book Award fiction nominees could arguably be called historical novels), recreating the historical past in this way has increasingly become a privileged strategy among both writers and critics, garnering many critical plaudits and prestigious prizes. It is apparently one of the most recognizably "novel-like" things a writer might attempt these days.

But this is so only because most historical novels, as To Catch the Lightning illustrates, invoke the most conventional, hidebound notions of what a "novel" is and does, reinforced by these novels' emphasis on story--enhanced by the broader arc of historical "story" that such novels want to expropriate--on "character" as embodied in "real people," on staged scenes dominated by "realistic" dialogue, all wrapped up in a transparent prose style occasionally colored by poetic flourishes and applications of "psychological realism." This approach threatens to recalcify fiction in its own historically contingent, now thoroughly reductive form. A "novel" becomes simply a narrative of events modeled on the writing of history, except that the characters can be made up and the story tweaked here and there. If the true purpose of the historical novel is to return us not just to the recounted days but also the literary assumptions of yore, then I guess its practicioners are to some extent succeeding.

Many of the fans of this earnest brand of historical fiction must no doubt discount "literary" values entirely, except in the simplistic sense I've discussed. One reviewer of To Catch the Lightning suggests it "will appeal to a wide audience interested in the history of the American West, Native American culture, and the origins of photography." What about readers interested in aesthetic experience, in provocative writing, in, well, literature? What would reading this novel add not to our understanding of "the origins of photography," information about which is available in countless nonfiction books and essays, but to our appreciation of the origins of fiction in literary art? It's not so much that such questions continue to go unanswered in the consideration of history-based novels; as far as I can tell, they are never asked.

Comments

[D.W. Merriman]

First time poster here, long time reader.

What's ruffling your feathers is symptomatic of the current trend in novels. I like to think of the novel in the twentieth century as having four distinct movements, which can be further caterogized into two dichotomies. The first dichotomy includes modernism, which exalted the text as being a culmination of history and culture, and postmodernism, which belittled the text as merely a product of the current historical and cultural climate. The second dichotomy includes magical realism, which treats as reality what presumably could not happen, and the cultural or historical novel, which treats as reality what presumably did happen.

Novelists and critics, as a group, have yet to advance past this final trend of the twentieth century. You astutely mentioned that "all five of the 2008 National Book Award fiction nominees could arguably be called historical novels." This is symptomatic of the current trend: to presume that the novel is examining actual reality. More popular is the cultural novel, presuming that the reality of a culture can be examined. Recall postcolonialist Le Clézio's Nobel win, and Horace Engdahl's revealing assertion (which you discussed in a post) that the United States cannot win a Nobel since it is too culturally insular. (Milan Kundera, in his book "The Curtain", describes this as the "provincialism of large nations", as their culture is large enough and rich enough for insularity.) This, as well as the infatuation with the opposite in magical realism, is all just a trend, the current movement. Dan, whether you like it or not, this will undoubtedly be replaced with a different trend, and a counter trend will follow, whatever that may be.

I will say, Dan, that I, too, am frustrated that sticking with the current trend, rather than experimentation, is rewarded. My guess is that only when a seminal work arrives and announces a new movement (such as "The Waste Land" or "Ulysess" for modernism or "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for magical realism) will the precursors to such a movement be appreciated retroactively.

[Dan Green]

D.W.: Thanks for your interesting comment. I think you're probably right, both about the presumption that that "the novel is examining actual reality" and that the fashion for history-based fiction will pass. It's not happening very fast, however.

[Luther Blissett]

Dan, there's a vast and interesting body of scholarship on the historical novel and its purposes beyond "merely . . . re-creat[ing] the past." One of my favorites is George Dekkar's *The American Historical Romance*, which explores as its central insight Coleridge's observation about Scott's Waverley novels: the historical novel is one that takes as its main conflict the battle between conservatism and progress, tradition and change. It need not be set too far in the past, it need not have local color or accurate costumes. It need only ponder the question of how something new is born into the world.

As such, the historical novel has often been at the forefront of artistic innovation, as it mixes genres and discourses to stage the conflict between past and future values. It's no wonder that, as Linda Hutcheon points out, postmodern fiction is often very much a type of historical fiction (from Wilson Harris and Alejo Carpentier at the founding of magical realism to Pynchon to Alasdair Gray to Steve Erikson to Barth).

[Dan Green]

There is postmodern historical fabulation, and then there's historical fiction, such as the novel discussed in this post, the goal of which is clearly to recreate the past. It's the latter I can't appreciate.

[Luther Blissett]

And the point is that "postmodern historical fabulation" is an awkward way of saying "historical novel." You're free to try to redefine "historical novel" to mean "costume drama," provided you acknowledge the fact that there wouldn't be any postmodern historical fabulation without the tradition of Scott, Cooper, Hawthorne and Hugo.

I'm with Dekkar, though: if it doesn't dramatize the historical and historiographic processes, it's not historical fiction. It's just a novel set in the past.