Remaking History

The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions

Jerome De Groot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317436164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts including films, television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and vampires, broker relationships to 'history', while also enabling audiences to understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered.

Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly they allow reflection upon how the past is constructed as 'history'. In doing so, they provide an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton's Anne Boleyn, along with the work of directors such as Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic other is constructed.

Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa.

Part I Ethics, politics, and nationalism

1 Reading And Ethics

DOI: 10.4324/9781315693392-1

Trusting the historical novel

This chapter considers the historical novel as emblematic of historical fictions in general. It opens with a general discussion of ideas relating to the form, as a way of outlining some of the key ideas the book as a whole will grapple with. The chapter therefore uses the well-established example of the historical novel genre to demonstrate some fundamental issues relating to historical fictions more widely. In particular, it suggests that the historical novel allows the writer to meditate upon society’s strange relationship with the alterity of the past. Hilary Mantel’s introductory ‘Note’ to The Giant, O’Brien – a book obsessed with the telling of stories – neatly demonstrates this central conceit. In this opening explanatory comment, commonplace in the form, she outlines the explicit intellectual and ethical challenge the historical novel presents to an audience: ‘This is not a true story, though it is based on one’.¹ How do readers confront the commonplace, definitional conundrum that historical fictions cleave to fact and authenticity, even as they point out their own falsehood? The narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion puts it in similarly disarming fashion: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’.² Fiction disavows the fact and ordering associated culturally with ‘history’. In Mantel’s combination of self-conscious untruth (the recounting of narrative) and an appeal to trust lies the aesthetics of historical fiction, constantly striving for a ‘reality’ while acutely aware of fiction. The contract made with the audience is one of trust, the reader or viewer allowing the untruths that are being presented. The reader acknowledges their fictive quality while, at some level, ‘believing’ in the realism and authenticity of the text.

Mantel’s confident assertion is part of her paratextual outlining of the ‘latitude’ she has taken in writing her novel (‘Note’, sig. A6v). It is not true, she says, but gestures towards something that is. The logic of the sentence seems to suggest that, although this is not a true story, the historical record is itself, at best, a kind of accurate narrative: ‘though it is based on one [ie. a true story]’. Mantel’s note is the first text that a reader encounters after a self-conscious epigraph from George Macbeth’s poem The Cleaver Garden: ‘But then,/All crib from skulls and bones who push the pen./Readers crave bodies. We’re the resurrection men’ (sig. A5r). Taken together, these paratextual moments frame the novel. The Macbeth citation reminds the reader that the historical novelist deals in reclaiming those who are often long dead, resurrecting bodies from the past and breathing false fictional life into them. The ‘Note’ points out to a reader just some of the moments at which the author has deviated from the record. The reader, then, is signalled, not once but twice, before they even read a word of fictional historical story, that this is a wrought, created, false thing that they are encountering, part of some unholy ritual of raising dusty bodies (specifically, ‘skulls and bones’ and ‘bodies’, not ghosts).

As this example shows, historical novels clearly invite the reader to reflect upon the ways in which ‘history’ is told to them. They have a double effect, a kind of unsettling uncanniness, which seeks to enable an awareness of the wroughtness of both ‘history’ and ‘fiction’.³ Historical novels present something that looks like a past that readers think they know. They are often read within a nexus of entertainment, imaginative journeying, and pedagogy, as audiences turn to them to find out about eras and understand particular periods. This means that they contribute powerfully to the historical imaginary, and, hence, it is important to understand their own historiographic positions and aesthetic strategies.⁴ Historical novels participate in a semi-serious game of authenticity and research, deploying tropes of realism and mimesis, while weaving fictional narrative. The realistic heft is what is looked for in the novels – reviewers regularly emphasize the authenticity, the affective impact, of historical fiction (it smells right, it feels right, the snap and tang of the past are communicated effectively).⁵ A.N. Wilson writes of Hilary Mantel: ‘Here, perhaps, we touch upon what makes historical fiction successful. I have no idea whether Mantel’s More is a fair picture but because her novel is so realistic, I am prepared to believe her’.⁶ Belief, here, is associated with stylistic realism, predicated upon a set of representational tropes that are agreed to be authentic rather than ‘fair’. The realist aesthetic in historical fiction, as elsewhere, is innately conservative and complex.⁷ Yet, simultaneously, the reader is aware, as is the writer, that the ‘realist’ work they are reading is a narrative, incomplete, unfinished, unable to communicate anything other than a contemporary construction of an unknown, untouchable, lost, dead world.⁸ Fiction undermines the totalizing effects of historical representation and points out that what is known is always partial, always a representation. Sensing this, historical novelists seek solace in authenticity and fiction simultaneously – citing their extreme research, at the same time as they distance themselves from ‘reality’. The historical novel, therefore, sits at a peculiar angle to its creator, who generally disavows its reality while asserting its diegetic wholeness, authenticity, and truth. As a form, it raises questions about the virtue of representation and the choices made by both author and reader in interrogating and understanding the world.

Historical novels are diverse, strange things that contain a multitude of often-contradictory ideas about memory, ethics, history, and identity. They enact an exploration of truth, authenticity, epistemology, and historiography. Keith Jenkins points out how much historiographical theory, over the past few decades, has sought to assert the textuality of representations of the past, demonstrating that works of ‘history’ are merely imaginative assertions: ‘For texts are not cognitive, empirical, epistemological entities, but speculative, propositional invitations to imagine the past ad infinitum’.⁹ In this light, the historical novel can be seen as simply one more way of conceptualizing the past, an epistemological exercise in ‘imagining’.¹⁰ Michel de Certeau, among others, thought that fiction was ‘the repressed other of historical discourse’; this was, claims Hayden White, because ‘historical discourse wages everything on the true, while fictional discourse is interested in the real – which it approaches by way of an effort to fill out the domain of the possible or imaginable’.¹¹ De Certeau famously argued that, ‘the past is the fiction of the present’, outlining a view of historiography that suggested its relationship to the enaction of power structures.¹² In contrast, the potentiality of the historical novel to imagine, albeit aesthetically, to speculate and construct, is the point of writing about the past: ‘the human effort to represent, imagine and think the world in its totality, both actual and possible, both real and imagined, both known and only experienced’ (p. 147). Fiction is able to hypothesize, to imagine, to guess. What is compelling for White about the historical novel is that it inhabits and manages the ‘borderlands between a chaotic or entropic historical reality [. . .] and the orderly and domesticated versions of that reality provided by professional historians’ (p. 152). The key aspect of this particular historiographical intervention is the self-consciousness that Mantel artfully deploys. By brokering a relationship between ‘real’ and ‘fiction’ that is constantly in a state of flux and, further, by pointing out the epistemological gap inherent in representing the past (in fiction or ‘history’) through such self-conscious (and generically fundamental) motifs, historical novels undertake sophisticated conceptual work.

Furthermore, historical novels force the reader into a temporal disjuncture. They demand a shifting of imaginative time and, most particularly, a recognition of temporal otherness. Georg Lukács argued that the historical novel reminds the reader of their historicity and the possibility of otherness, death, and age. He posits the ‘invention’ of a sense of historicalness, a feeling post-revolution of the continuation and development of history as something non-static: ‘Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them’.¹³ Nietzsche appreciated Scott for the same reasons, as Richard Maxwell illustrates: ‘he is historian because he is subject to history, and capable of externalizing his subjection’.¹⁴ Lukács demonstrated that the historical novel inaugurates a revolutionary possibility through the imposition of a sense of pastness that might hold within it a sense of futurity. In its reminder of the individual as part of something that might be called history/past/timeliness/historicity, and in its creation of a dynamic timeline and imaginative space of potentiality within the representation of history, the historical novel fragments and fractures the reader’s relationship with that history. The historicity that is inaugurated is not linear, but dynamic and simultaneous. In a recent overview of the historical novel as a ‘widespread [. . .] mutation’, Perry Anderson outlines Frederic Jameson’s account of the form. For Jameson, the ‘exaggerated inventions of a fabulous and non-existent past (and future)’ exhibited by the historical novel is intended to:

rattle at the bars of our extinct sense of history, unsettle the emptiness of our temporal historicity, and try convulsively to reawaken the dormant existential sense of time by way of the strong medicine of lies and impossible fables, the electro-shock of repeated doses of the unreal and the unbelievable.¹⁵

Hence, historical novels can critique the hegemonic structure of a totalizing, explaining history. They challenge a deeply ideological sense of temporal identity, challenging hegemonic structures of knowing the now. The strategies inherent in knowing, enacting, and constructing official versions of history are laid bare by the effects of historical novels which attempt to hold within them the actuality and the authority of history, but always, always know, deep down, that they are fabrications. The past as presented in historical novels is an enactment, a recreation, a performance of pastness; it is a mimicking of a dominant discourse that enables the consideration of other multiplicities of identity and behaviour. In many ways, the popular historical text, whether it be film or television or book, is the other of the archive, the dissident, illegitimate reflection of the official, with playful inversion and misrecognition inherent in its being. Where the archive or the library is memory, the popular text is mismemory and misquotation.

The translation of the past into a recognizable, readable present demands a set of formal procedures and aesthetic assumptions that are particularly disconcerting, accruing around the illusion of authenticity. To use thoughts on linguistic translation, this involves ‘the appearance . . . that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original”’.¹⁶ Somehow, the historical novel must look like it is the original. This is the authentic fallacy. The illusion of this translation is key to the effect of the historical novel. Realism in historical novels – and historical fictions more generally – consists of aesthetic strategies designed to persuade an audience of the veracity of the representation. The fictions cleave to a particular set of evidentiary tropes gathered from governing discourses of authenticity. The past is filtered and reordered for a readership in the present by the gatekeeper novelist. Translation is inherently violent, and bringing the past into the present through these fictional means is problematic.¹⁷ The ethics of translating and transporting the past into the now are complex, and meditated upon by historical novelists. The explanation of, the discussion of, the representation of, the other that is the past leads the writer into strange areas, and the provocation to the historical novelist is how to balance, understand, and conceptualize this; how to demonstrate, in their presentation of the past, that they understand the alienness and unknowability of that past.¹⁸

The essential relativism and reflection that link historical fiction and ontological temporal experience are expressed thoughtfully by John Fowles in his 1986 book A Maggot:

[She cries] the small tears of one who knows herself without choice. Her time has little power of seeing people other than they are in outward; which applies even to how they see themselves, labelled and categorized by circumstance and fate.¹⁹

At first glance, this seems to argue for historical relativism – the audience are not like them – of the kind that Fowles deploys regularly to rebut Marxist views of history in his earlier The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Yet the affective moment here (the emotional, resonant echo of pastness) is counterpointed by Fowles’s assertion of mutual incomprehension, when he continues:

To us such a world would seem abominably prescribed, with personal destiny fixed to an intolerable degree, totalitarian in its essence; while to its chained humans our present lives would seem incredibly fluid, mobile, rich in free will [. . .] and above all anarchically, if not insanely, driven by self-esteem and self-interest.

(p. 55)

They were, the reader is, neither is correct; both are simply nodes in the river of history – which has the appearance of continual flow in one direction, but has great fluidity, eddies of strangeness, and huge inertia at points. The past is obscene, but so is the present, and, in this moment of disavowal, Fowles interrogates the historicity of the reader, challenging them to realize that they are part of a chaos that society attempts to frame as ‘history’.

Another key moment of self-consciousness in Fowles’s text comes much later, where he is attempting again to account for historical difference:

We should do better to imagine a world where, once again, a sense of self barely exists; or most often where it does, is repressed; where most are still like John Lee, more characters written by someone else than free individuals in our comprehension of the adjective and the noun.

(p. 392)

Fowles reaches for the metaphor of textuality to try to explain a life without interiority in the modern sense. What is different is identity, and, particularly, the way in which our modern lives are fundamentally equated to language (‘free individuals’ = adjective + noun). Modern people have become archivized, able only to express themselves – and, strikingly, their freedom – through words, rather than more bodily, less cerebral (or selfish) existence. That said, Fowles illustrates the loss of – the absence of – self by using language (‘repressed’) that plays with modern articulations. This is a moment of address to t...