Reading Historical Fiction

The Revenant and Remembered Past

Kate Mitchell, N. Parsons, N. Parsons

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137291547
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Moderne Literaturkritik

This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation.

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Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present

Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons

When the Institute of Historical Research (UK) held its annual conference for 2011 on the topic of historical fiction, involving academic and public historians as well as historical novelists and publishers (though notably not literary critics), public demand for access was so great that the organisers developed a website in order to host a ‘virtual’ conference only a few days later. The conference, entitled ‘Novel Approaches’, probed a number of questions relating to the relationship between academic history and historical fiction, including how the two fields might be differentiated, how firm the boundary is between them, and whether the genre of historical fiction has become ‘respectable’. None of these questions are new; all have been the subject of popular and academic debate at least since the eighteenth century and yet they continue to be the focus of energetic discussion.

While academic interest in historical fiction has been strong for much of the late twentieth century, the relationship between the past and the present as it is mediated by the literary text is now being constituted and assessed in new and innovative ways both within the academy and in the public sphere. The public interest in, and esteem accorded to, historical fiction is reflected in bestseller lists and literary prizes – most notable, perhaps, is the dominance of historical fiction in Man Booker and Orange Prize short lists, and the establishment of the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction in 2010 – while the extent of academic interest is demonstrated by the number of recent monographs that reassess historical fiction within discrete literary periods.

Existing scholarship about the relationship between past, present and future in historical fiction focuses almost exclusively on the author’s production of historical meaning, assessing the mediation in individual texts of different historical sources and the use of specific literary techniques. As a result it overlooks the role the reader plays in mediating or even renegotiating that relationship. Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley have recently faulted postmodern accounts of meaningmaking processes for denying the agency of the reader, or audience, proceeding instead ‘as if particular texts are inevitably tied to specific responses’ (2006, 929). They argue that these explanatory frameworks assume that literary and other medial representations are ‘passively accepted by the audience, resulting in loss of meaning at the site of reception’ (2006, 929). This critical focus on the text elides the role of the reader in producing historical meaning. Yet, as Astrid Erll has recently observed, the potential of fiction to produce historical consciousness must be ‘realised in the process of reception’ and, consequently, the meaning of a text must be traced beyond its own borders to the debates, remediations, and intertextual references it generates (2008, 395). Rather than suggesting that fictional texts instantiate a single relationship to the past, the essays gathered together in this volume demonstrate that this relationship is materialised through the process of reading and is multiple, even within the one text.

Scholarship on historical fiction is largely organised according to discrete literary periods. As a result the central claims about the strategies and effects of historical representation in fiction in each period remain untested. For example, contemporary scholarship that claims that the late twentieth century is marked by a uniquely obsessive concern with the status of history and fiction as modes of representation has not been thoroughly tested against the anxious debates over the relationship between history and fiction in the eighteenth century. This collection, Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, takes an extended historical view. By grouping analyses of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century texts together, it provides a clearer sense of both the shifts and the continuities in the way historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices intersect.

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As Ernest Bernbaum argued in the early twentieth century, historical fiction has always been judged primarily according to its accuracy. Critics like Leslie Stephen assumed that ‘the first and the last thing to ask in judging an historical novel is whether it is in exact accord with the so-called facts of history’ (Bernbaum 1926, 431). The problem of the genre’s relationship to history has coloured studies of the genre, with critics concentrating on ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ as its component parts. Accounts of the genre’s origins, for example, have tended to focus on its intervention in the field of historiography, rather than that of fiction. As a result, historical fiction is understood to participate in a field that already exists as an authoritative discourse. This perspective is especially apparent in studies of the historical novel that concentrate on Scott’s Waverley Novels. Ina Ferris argues that Scott asserted his deference to history, aiming to fill the gaps left by the historical record, but not to challenge, displace or otherwise distort history with his fiction (203–7). It is in this sense, of filling the gaps of historiography, that Georg Lukács suggests Scott’s novels supplement historical accounts of the past by exploring the effects of historical processes on the ‘ordinary man’, in accordance with the emergent bourgeoisie’s identity (1969, 22–5). Similarly, Elisabeth Wesseling suggests that, in his Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe, Scott ‘attempted to appropriate to the novelist what used to be the task of the historian proper, namely the lively and persuasive presentation of extant historical knowledge’ (44).

In recent decades, critics have challenged this focus on Scott as the progenitor of the historical novel and the corresponding claim that a supplementary relationship to history is paradigmatic of the genre. Eighteenth-century novels that were once read as ‘historicised fiction’ (Zimmerman 1996, 51), such as Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) and Jonathan Swift’s The Memoirs of Capt. John Creighton (1731), are now being read in new ways that suggest eighteenth-century readers and authors had a more nuanced understanding of fiction’s relationship to history, one not necessarily predicated on deference. As Clement Hawes has recently summarised, this scholarship demonstrates that the ‘early novel is thus not merely concerned with a mimesis of history – with an accurate imitation of what happened – but, and above all, with how history is reconstructed from its traces’ (2011, 64). The focus on the reconstruction of the past from its traces is more usually associated with postmodern treatments of history in fiction, particularly with Linda Hutcheon’s claim that historiographic metafiction is more concerned with representing the process of historical representation than with reconstituting the past (1988). But this body of new scholarship about eighteenth-century historical representation challenges the idea that early fiction produced a simpler (and perhaps more naïve) relationship between past and present.

Anne Stevens’s essay (Chapter 2), ‘Learning to Read the Past in the Early Historical Novel’, reflects this recognition of a more complex relationship between history and fiction. She traces the origins of historical fiction into the eighteenth century, arguing that this new genre required new reading practices which combined strategies readers were more accustomed to apply to historiography with those they brought to bear on fiction. Readers of these narratives, then, had to experiment in order to negotiate the potentially competing demands of an identificatory reading with the habits of instruction and exemplarity. These necessarily new reading practices generated anxious debate, particularly in the pages of periodicals where reviewers worried whether the combination of history and fiction confused the distinction between truth and invention in dangerous ways, or whether fictionalising historical events added delight to instruction.

Stevens’s essay employs the strategies of distant reading, advocated by Franco Morretti, in order to read the prefaces of a selection of these historical novels and identify patterns in the cues offered to readers as to how to construe their contents. According to Stevens, the reading strategies these prefaces either model or exhort provide an important context for understanding the shaping of the historical novel in the literary field. She demonstrates that larger questions about the emergence of historical fiction and its generic status are actually staged in prefaces to the novels that were the subject of the debate. In this way, prefaces to early historical novels can be understood as a material mediation between the epistemological and ontological concerns promoted by the emergence of historical fiction and the practices of readers themselves.

Hamish Dalley’s essay (Chapter 3), ‘Temporal Systems in Representations of the Past: Distance, Freedom and Irony in Historical Fiction’, also explores strategies for negotiating the formal rules of fiction and of historiography but with a focus on contemporary novels. He identifies the different objectives of historians and novelists in terms of claims to objectivity and critical distance. Observing that historiography’s need to objectify, in order to analyse and accurately represent the past as finished or passed, is at odds with the novel’s need to create narrative uncertainty, Dalley argues that historical novels reconcile this potential incompatibility by refiguring the division of past and present ‘as an internal divide between those parts of the narrative concerned with “public” events of social existence, and the “private concerns”’ of characters (36). The result is that historical novels often create two distinct temporal systems: one that collapses distance and one that maintains it. Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days (1993) establishes a break between past and present that imitates the critical distance assumed by historiography and strives to distance the reader from its representation of the past; the actions and choices of the protagonist create narrative tension within what Dalley terms a ‘bubble’ of contingency but, as her actions do not affect the course of known history, distance is maintained. History appears to be teleological here, governed by its own dynamic that remains distinct from human action. Moorhouse’s chief concern appears to be to memorialise the League of Nations, re-membering it for his readers. The temporal system he deploys, Dalley argues, is analogous to Lukács’s classic model of historical fiction. In contrast, Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant (2008), he suggests, ‘violate[s] temporal distance by failing to maintain the distinction between the bubble of contingency and its distanced historical setting’ (38), thereby eliding distance and difference in order to establish connections between past and present. Grenville’s novel typifies Dalley’s second temporal system, which represents the past ‘as contingent’, undermining teleological closure and enabling ‘a proliferation of alternative or counterfactual representations, as each hinge point opens not only onto the past that did occur, but also onto pasts that might have occurred’ (47). The effacement of critical distance is designed to have effects in the present: Grenville’s novel challenges the idea that the violence characterising Australia’s past is inevitable, a challenge that, Dalley argues, generates choices for the future. What a comparison of these two examples demonstrates is that the critical distance associated with historiography is a textual effect, one that can be deployed by historiography and fiction alike. Historical fiction deploys multiple temporal systems, sometimes within the one text, depending on the use to which the past is put.

Dalley’s discussion of Grenville’s representation of frontier conflict in nineteenth-century Australia highlights the advantage of fiction in giving voice to silenced groups, a trait long recognised and connected to its ability to imaginatively go beyond the established ‘facts’ of the historical record. Rather than only retrospectively ‘write back’ to partial and occlusive historical accounts, however, Mary Spongberg’s essay (Chapter 4), ‘“All histories are against you?”: Family History, Domestic History and the Feminine Past in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion’, suggests that fiction gave late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women a means to enter history – as both its authors and its subjects. Her essay examines the way women writers, including Jane Austen and Frances Burney, used the productive possibilities of historical fiction to write particularly feminine pasts at a time when historiography privileged political events and the deeds of men. Understanding Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as domestic histories of the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution respectively, Spongberg argues that Austen’s texts present ‘the novel as an ideal space for articulating women’s historical experience’ (52). Austen draws on a tradition of embedding ‘conventional political histories within familial narratives domesticating history and creating distinctively feminine perspectives on the past’ (52–3), a tradition that includes Sophia Lee, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. These domesticated, novelised, histories also make it clear that there are distinct differences in the way men and women experience the past. As Spongberg demonstrates, this ‘marks an eloquent refusal to cede historical understanding to the realm of men’ as reviewers writing for the Edinburgh Review and other periodicals seemed to demand. Moreover, Austen’s novels challenge ‘the idea of “real solemn history”, allowing women a different form of historical authority, an emotional connection absent in men who are free to embrace modernity’ (66).

That women novelists could embed conventional histories within their domesticated and feminine versions suggests that the value of fiction for revising, or fleshing out, the omissions of the historical record extends beyond its ability to imagine lost subjectivities and speak with silenced voices to its creation of multi-layered texts that can incorporate, and hold in tension, multiple perspectives. Recently, Birgit Neumann has argued that this ability creates the possibility for what she calls ‘mutual perspectivisation’, in which different perspectives can be brought to bear upon each other within the same text. It is not simply that fiction can voice multiple perspectives through different characters; rather, Neumann argues, literature’s intertextual and intermedial references build ‘structural multi-perspectivity’ into texts. In its very form, fiction resists univocal representations and privileges multiple perspectives, making its contribution to historical recollection unique (2008, 339).

Several essays in this collection explore the creative possibilities of intertextual and intermedial reworkings of earlier artistic work as a means to redress past wrongs; to create a spectacular historical experience; or to create a sense of shared cultural memory that transcends the passage of time. James Ward’s essay (Chapter 5), ‘Rereading Hogarth and Pope: Authenticity and Academic Fictions of the Eighteenth Century’, engages sustained intertextual reworkings of eighteenth-century texts in contemporary fiction. It addresses the ethics of reading the past in fiction by troubling the idea of ‘authenticity’ in relation to historical representation, particularly where such representations seem to provide access to painful pasts. Taking as his examples Sophie Gee’s and David Dabydeen’s novelistic reworkings of, respectively, Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock (1714) and William Hogarth’s set of engravings A Harlot’s Progress (1732), he formulates the category ‘academic fiction’ to examine the particular contribution made by novels in which academic research – understood, in Ward’s terms, ‘as both a body of knowledge and a specialised way of thinking about texts and culture’ (68) – underwrites the representation of past texts and figures. The authors’ formative research is silently embedded within the novel itself, creating an ‘authentic’ feel even as the texts also undermine this notion and its interpretative value. Academic fictions are aware of the problematic nature of claims to historical truth and ‘engage with and critique a set of competing claims, ideas and discourses closely related to truth, which’, Ward argues, ‘may be labelled by a single term: authenticity’, as opposed to ‘truth’ or ‘accuracy’ (68). He uses Frank Ankersmit’s notion of authenticity to suggest ‘the validity of fictional historical representations without the claim of empirical certainty implied in the recourse to truth’ (72). Here, a novel that recreates a plausible, or vivid, impression of the past has achieved an ‘authentic’ representation. Approaching ‘authenticity’ as a social construction with ideological implications, he describes it ‘not as an inherent quality of texts but as a condition invested in them by readers as well as authors’ (70). It is through the concept of authenticity that Ward develops a sense of the ethical stakes in reading and writing historical fiction.

Through his discussion of Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999), Ward addresses the remedialisation of texts. In its attention to historical fiction’s relationship to historiography, scholarship sometimes neglects the way fiction functions in relation to other media, both drawing upon other sources, like art, architecture, film and so on, and also contributing to the ways in which these media engage the past. Yet as Ann Rigney argues, ‘the cultural power of an artistic work [is] located in the cultural activities it gives rise to, rather than in what it is in itself’ (2008, 349). Two essays in this collection argue for historical fiction’s connection to other, largely visual, means of remembering the past, and the cross-referencing of particular historical events across a range of media.

Helen Groth’s essay (Chapter 6), ‘Panoramic Byron: Reading, History and Pre-cinematic Spectacle’, argues that the ‘assimilation’ of literature into a domain of cultural production newly dominated by visual media in the early nineteenth century produced a distinctively modern way of reading the past. Focusing on the visual re-medialisation of Byron through static and staged panoramas, Groth traces the representation of the past through a confluence of visual and printed media including poetry, verse drama and stage sets, as well as panoramas, their guidebooks and the reviews that discussed them. Byron’s historical fictions, she argues, were reproduced and remediated both in these guidebooks, in panoramas and on the dramatic stage as ‘a conduit to a world of cosmopolitan possibility, significant historical event and glamour’ (85–6). Groth argues that ‘the panoramic remediation of Byronic extracts can be seen to heighten their historicity, transforming familiar literary fragments into historical artefacts that mark time, at a cultural moment when historical representation was being redefined in terms of the necessities of anachronism’ (86). Her essay begins with a discussion of Robert Burford’s strategic use of extracts of Byron’s Childe Harold in the guidebooks offered for sale to viewers of his Leicester Square panoramas. These guidebooks incorporated historical details and literary citations, requiring viewers of the panorama to move between literary and visual representation. In this way, the panoramas of Burford and his contemporaries align ‘literary reading and historical re-enactment’ (90). A similar process is also at work in early nineteenth-century productions of Byron’s poetic drama Sardanapalus (1821), a play that dramatises the legend of the last king of the Assyrian Empire. Groth examines the spectacular productions of the play by Charles Kean and William Charles Macready in the early nineteenth century in terms of what she calls ‘a collective exercise of archival assemblage’ (88). These two performances of the play fall after Byron’s death in 1824 and on either side of the spectacular archaeological discovery of the ancient Assyrian capital. Both deploy images of Nineveh as well as images of Byron as authenticating strategies that ‘legitimate the re-narration of history as a series of spectacular events’ (99) that can be experienced, in mediated form, in the present.

Kara Marler-Kennedy’s essay (Chapter 7), ‘“The Painted Record” in George Eliot’s Historical Novel Romola’, also focuses on the remedialisation of the past and the transformation of history into experience, examining the impact that developments in optics had on nineteenth-century historical consciousness. Discussing Eli...