Confusion and Turbulence

In an essay defending historical fiction, Allan Massie concludes that

There are essentially two sorts of novel, the open and the closed, even if many straddle the frontier that divides them. The closed novel is self-sufficient, free of the influence of public events. In the open novel, such events become characters in the action. The open novel is exposed to the winds of the world, its characters actors in history or victims of history. Given the difficulty of understanding the confusion and turbulence of the ever-changing present, it is natural that authors drawn to the open novel should turn to the past.

I am always skeptical of assertions that fiction is "essentially" this or that, and I am particularly skeptical of simple dichotomies such as this one.. Although Massie acknowledges that many novels "straddle" these oppositons, nevertheless the clear implication is that novelists are generally faced with an either/or choice: write novels that are open to the "winds of the world" or novels that are closed off, insular, neglectful of "public events." This particular kind of simple-minded classification is frequently used to dismiss overly aestheticized, formally adventurous fiction as insufficiently engaged with the real world, "merely literary," and it isn't any less obnoxious here because Massie finds the winds of the world blowing predominantly toward the past.

The notion that any fiction is "free of the influence of public events" is, of course, absurd, if by "public events" what is meant is "life," "experience," "reality." What work of fiction isn't influenced by "public events" because, ipso facto, the author is a human being drawing on his/her experience of the world? What text could be truly "self-sufficient" unless it generated itself, free of the writer's unavoidable immersion in "reality"? Perhaps my objection is too literal-minded, taking Massie's talk of self-sufficiency and "winds of the world" at face value as descriptions of our perception of certain kinds of novels rather than metaphorically, approximations of the reading experience--"it's as if this novel wanted to be self-sufficient, turned inward into language" or "it's as if this one is trying to take stock of historical circumstances." It is true, after all, that the closed novel is not really self-sufficient, nor is "history" or "the world" really to be found in the open novel. Both are verbal compositions, constructions of words, and Massie is just commenting on the effect some novels sometimes create.

But Massie certainly doesn't give the impression he's speaking metaphorically about the mission of historical fiction.

Why do novelists turn away from the present day to the past, and sometimes, like Harris, to the now far distant past? There is evidently no single reason. The writer may have become fascinated by some historical figure. . .Obsession with a particular period — the First World War, for instance — may suggest the theme for a novel. The author may wish to explore the past for its own sake, or to use it to point up the present.

The writer turns not to the printed page in an exercise of imagination but "from the present day to the past." Historical figures and periods, not language, is the root of his obsession, and he wants to "explore the past" not the possibilities of fiction. Massie seems to be describing someone whose primary interest indeed is in the "world," at least as this can be known historically, not in literary art. The latter is left to the narrower ministrations of those writers less committed to their creations as "actors in history."

It seems to me that Massie's historical novel is actually more "closed" than those stuck in the present and stuck with their author's commitment to art. "The past is more manageable and easier to grasp than the present," he writes. Further, it is "our present uncertainties" that account for "the attraction of the historical novel and the vogue it once again enjoys." That the present is full of "uncertainties" must surely be true, but then again it must have always been true, and it hardly seems appropriate to suggest that fiction's job should be to avoid those uncertainties. It may be that "the past is more manageable and easier to grasp," but since when has it been deemed that the art of the novel lies in seeking out that which is manageable and easy to grasp? The greatest fiction has always opened itself up to uncertainty and portrayed existence as something difficult to grasp indeed. By this measure historical fiction is a retreat not just into the past but away from what should be the fiction writer's most overriding responsibility. It cuts itself off from fiction's true subject.

Some historical fiction assuredly does open itself to uncertainty and doubt. Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones succeeds precisely because it subverts our confidence that we know what Nazis were, that we have adequate explanations for what motivated them. Thomas Pynchon's recent Inherent Vice was an attempt to "capture" the late 1960s in Los Angeles, but while it does surround the period in an idyllic (and marijuna-produced) haze, at the same it shows the idyll to be inherently unstable, setting the conditions of its own dispersement. It is a period that is far from "manageable" in our assessment of its rise and fall. Some novels are set in the past, but do not take the past itself as subject, do not take the re-creation of historical characters and events as a self-sufficient ambition.

But for me the vast majority of historical novels are just an effort at such re-creation, and, given that I am motivated to read fiction for the aesthetic experience it might provide and not to learn about history, they are therefore mostly irrelevant to the consideration of fiction as a literary art. Whether it is an attempt to "explore the past for its own sake" or to use the past "to point up the present," historical fiction is an effort to use the form for a purpose other than, or secondary to, creating an aesthetically credible work of art--ultimately the only purpose worthy of motivating us to designate writing as "literary" in the first place. It can be defended as such, but the reading experience it provides directs our attention toward extra-literary "content" rather than expanding our attention in the present as art is able to do.

Comments

[Jacob Russell]

All novels are about their own time and place. There's no such thing as "historical fiction," only revisions and re-revisions of relations between public memory and the present.

[Jacob Russell]

... and The Kindly Ones succeeds, not as 'historical fiction' --which it isn't, but because it addresses itself so unsparingly to the three plus generations of accumulated public memory.. and the mythologizing that preceded and informs them and its continuation in the always self-correcting mind of the narrator.

[Frances Madeson]

But what about Morris Dickstein's “20 year rule” as elucidated in his Bookforum essay Faction and Political Fact? And I quote:

“Political novels work best when they show how history really affects the fate of individuals, and when their characters have the density, the contradictory fullness, of real people, instead of coming through as cardboard cutouts or historical ciphers. The writer can grasp this best perhaps twenty years or so after the fact, not when too much time has passed or when the events are still too raw. Don DeLillo's reconstruction of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination in Libra (1988) is one example.”

Personally, I think that's a recipe for irrelevance and impotence. What if instead of neutering DeLillo (impossible, by the way) or trying to, the Dickmeister had at the time of Libra's publication (May Day 1991, a year that started on a Tuesday) understood (as Jacob immediately grasps about TKO) that DeLillo was using the past to predict the future (as Jim H is doing right this very moment in his Fouling the Nest post on Wisdom of the West). The last word, the very last word, in Libra is “history” which on page 321 he defines as “the sum total of all things they aren't telling us.”

On page 207 of Mirror in the Roadway, look at what you-know-who selects to emphasize about DeLillo's portrayal of Oswald, what he classily calls DeLillo's “fix on the violent blue-collar male...” What a peculiarly reductive takeaway, especially given his own criteria stated above, from a most complex portrait, even in the context of the statement (a discussion about the works of Russell Banks). How do you spell literary criticism marinating in rampant ideology?

In his offhand way, DeLillo teaches many important lessons in Libra, including certain etymologies, for instance the relationship in Arabic between the words assassin and hashish (on page 342). Looking at it in the mirror in the roadway, the induced state of smoky alteredness, the hyper reality of the hashish high, is a metaphor in the collective unconscious for the delusion of the assassin. But when Morris Dickstein, a Pisces like Marion Barry and Tammy Faye Baker, passes the hookah one's way, a perfectly polite and appropriate response is, “No thank you, Morrie. I'd prefer not to.” And if he insistently pushes it on you, please feel free to borrow (at 0% interest) my personal credo, with hats off to Melina Mercouri: “Never on Tuesday.”

[Andy]

We remain endlessly interested in literary criticism marinating in hatred of Morris Dickstein.

[Frances Madeson]

Thanks, Andy. Please do let me know if it grows tiresome or dull. Because I could work up something on Dick Morris as a change of pace. At your service!

[beth]

Like you, I'm skeptical of simple dichotomies ("open", "closed") about most kinds of art, and see them as a rather lazy but superficially clever smokescreen hiding a critic's inability to consider his or her subject more deeply. On the other hand, I'm also wary of any all-encompassing definitions such as "historical fiction." I do read a lot of novels set in a particular place and time, where the action and character development are at least influenced by that, sometimes crucially, and have been thinking about why some of them are so satisfying as literature and some never manage to escape the trap of "re-creation." However, the answer has nothing to do with these silly categories of "open" or "closed."

I do like reading fiction that teaches me something about history, and don't want to dismiss any and all books falling into that category. As an example, two "historical" books about Turkey: Louis de Bernieres' "Birds Without Wings," which I'm currently reading, is entertaining and well-written and clearly focused on re-creating the historical world of small-town Anatolia before and during the fall of the Ottoman empire. Bernieres creates characters with some complexity, but to me they never go beyond "types" which he needed to tell the historical story. But Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's "A Mind at Peace," set in Istanbul on the eve of WWII, is another thing entirely. Not only is it faithful to the history of the time and characters who might have lived then, and fascinating because of them, but it transcends time and history to speak of human truths that are universal, timeless, and also individual. At its best, it seems to me that this is what literature can do.

[paul]

I wonder if instead of "open" or "historical" fiction the idea of "researched fiction" would be helpful. Some novels have obviously been researched and have needed that research to be what they are (War and Peace, Gravity's Rainbow, Sotweed Factor, Ulysses) while other works ("closed" -- Kafka's, Beckett's) would be diminished, or not advanced, by incorporating exterior sources.

[Dan Green]

I don't look askance at fiction that uses "research" per se, if indeed it is necessary for the resulting novels "to be what they are." If the research is being used simply to "re-create" history as an end in itself, then that sort of fiction is indeed what I identified in the post as "an effort to use the form for a purpose other than" a literary one.

[Shelley]

As someone who does this kind of writing, I can only add that the "choice" of time period didn't feel like a choice at all: it rose up.

As for Pynchon's Inherent Vice, I found it touching that for the first time, the narrative, along with lots of laughter and celebration, includes a kind of sad warning about drug misuse. I think that's the sign of a great writer: he's not trapped, ever, inside his previous world.