From Progress to Catastrophe
Perry Anderson on the historical
novel
Within
the huge multiverse of prose fiction the historical novel has, almost by
definition, been the most consistently political. It is no surprise that it
should have occasioned what is still probably the best-known of all works of
Marxist literary theory, Lukács’s The Historical Novel, written in
Russian exile in the 1930s. Any reflection on the strange career of this form
has to begin there, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the
work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical
form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular
life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by
sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the
dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal.
Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction,
whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of
opposing extremes between whom they stand, or more often waver. What Scott’s
novels then stage is a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of
social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the
historical necessity of the winners. The classic historical novel, inaugurated
by Waverley,
is an affirmation of human progress, in and through the conflicts that divide
societies and the individuals within them.
It follows from Lukács’s conception that the
historical novel is not a specific or delimited genre or subgenre of the novel
tout court. Rather, it is simply a path-breaker or precursor of the great
realistic novel of the 19th century. A generation later, Balzac – for example –
essentially adapted Scott’s techniques and vision of the world to the present
instead of the past, treating the France of the Restoration or the July
Monarchy in much the same way that Scott had represented mid-18th-century
Scotland or 12th-century England. Balzac’s great successor, for Lukács, was the
towering figure of Tolstoy, whose War and Peace represents a peak simultaneously of
the historical and of the realist novel in the 19th century. In societies more
advanced than Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had by
this time pitted a revolutionary working class against a bourgeoisie that no
longer believed it bore the future within it, and was intent on crushing any
sign of an alternative to its rule. In this quite different – but after 1848
much more typical – situation, the connections of the past with the present
were cut in European fiction, and the historical novel gradually became a dead
antiquarian genre, specialising in more or less decadent representations of a
remote past with no living connection to contemporary existence, but
functioning rather as a rejection and escape from them. Such was,
archetypically, the fantasy of ancient Carthage constructed by Flaubert in Salammbô.
Fredric
Jameson, while remaining faithful to Lukács’s overall vision, has offered a
different periodisation within it. He suggests that, rather than seeing Scott
as the founder of the classically realist historical novel, we should view him
as the practitioner of a costume drama whose narrative form stages a binary
opposition between good and evil. A naive ethical antithesis of that sort is
the mark of melodrama, and it is no accident – Jameson suggests – that its
characteristic artistic expressions should be operatic, rather than novelistic.
The truth of Scott is to be found in Rossini or Donizetti, who borrowed from
him, rather than in Manzoni, let alone Balzac.
If we wish to see a truer exemplar of Lukács’s
prescriptions, Jameson argues, we must turn to War and Peace, a
historical novel whose triumph is to transcend the costume-drama oppositions of
hero and villain, in its remarkable portraits of a hyper-active yet futile
Napoleon, brittle symbol of the French, and an apparently torpid yet supremely
sagacious Kutuzov, authentic representative of the slow rhythms of the Russian
people and the peasant masses composing its overwhelming majority. Not only
this. In War and Peace we find a realism so advanced in its
figurations of psyche and sexuality that we seem to be in the presence of a
modernism avant la lettre. Yet there is a paradox here, Jameson remarks, in
that modernism proper, because of its commitment to the primacy of immediate
perception, appears to have been constitutively incapable of generating the
totalising retrospect that defines a true historical novel.
This is a brilliant rewriting of Lukács, the seduction
of whose starting point – recasting Scott as a librettist – is difficult to
resist. Certainly the ethical binary of good and evil imposes a logic of
melodrama on much of Scott’s work, but it might be said that Jameson has
flinched from the conclusion to be drawn from his own argument. For the fact is
surely that Tolstoy – far from transcending this melodramatic structure –
reproduces it still more extravagantly in the public narrative of War and Peace,
where the opposition between Napoleon and Kutuzov takes the binary of villainy
and virtue, the hateful versus the heroic, to caricatural extremes that Scott
rarely ventured. Tolstoy’s portrait of Napoleon, Jameson concedes, is perhaps
rather petty, unduly diminishing the emperor. But he implies that Tolstoy can
thereby be acquitted of demonising him. An answer to this, however, can be
found in Sartre’s notable deconstruction of the concept of evil in Saint Genet, where
he shows that the pure notion of evil is always caught in the same aporia –
what he calls a tourniquet. Either supreme iniquity
requires a hideous intelligence and daring in the performance of great crimes,
but if so it thereby borrows qualities from the good and ceases to be
absolutely evil. Or it is a merely deadened violence, devoid of any reflective,
let alone heroic dimension, but in that case it becomes a pathology without
responsibility, whose moral insignificance – ‘banality’, Arendt would call it –
fails in the opposite way to represent true evil. Tolstoy’s belittling of
Napoleon is simply the second variant of this antinomy of villainy, in itself
no better than the first.
That this is so can be seen vice versa in the figure
of Kutuzov. Jameson suggests that he is no conventional hero, but an empty
actant whose function is simply to represent the Russian peasant masses. What
tells against this view is not just the effusive, sentimental detail Tolstoy
lavishes on the serf-owner general – far more a projection of his own ideology
than anything to do with the Russian peasantry – but the lengths to which, as
Viktor Shklovsky demonstrated, he went to rig the historical record in
constructing him as a patriotic icon. In preparing War and Peace,
Tolstoy took the trouble to study, however selectively, materials of the
period, so was not unaware of salient realities of the time, but deliberately
bent the evidence where it was inconvenient for his propagandist purpose. This
is something Scott was on the whole reluctant to do. In War and Peace we are closer to the spirit of
Alexandre Dumas’s maxim: ‘On peut violer l’histoire à condition de lui faire de
beaux enfants.’
The question, of course, is whether Tolstoy’s
fictional portrait of Kutuzov qualifies as such a handsome offspring – that is,
a persuasive work of art. The evidence that it fails to do so is written out in
extenso in the novel itself, whose incoherent philosophical tirades on the
nature of history – deplored by virtually all its readers – function as a
compulsive make-weight for the flimsiness of the oleograph at one centre of the
narrative, the political stage on which the fate of Russia is played out. The
personal destinies of its fictional characters are another matter. But to grasp
the sense in whichWar and Peace is a historical novel, classically
interconnecting public events and private lives, it needs to be reinserted in
the series of which it is a member. This is something Lukács’s account of the
form touches on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one
great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic
nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni,
Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others.
The
original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against
Napoleonic expansion. Although this had popular roots, above all in the Tyrol,
Spain and Germany, it was everywhere also driven by the need of the continent’s
different ancien regimes to mobilise local enthusiasm for the defence of crown
and altar. Viewed as a whole, its dominant was always a counter-revolutionary
response to the French Revolution. But each particular national situation
generated its own distinct forms of imagination and retrospect. Scott was
writing in the one bastion of the old order that went unscathed through the
Napoleonic Wars, without so much as a single French footprint on British soil.
The focus of his nation-building narrative is thus quite distinct from its
Continental sequels, and corresponds to the duality of the composite British
kingdom itself.
On the one hand, there is the heroic story of the
emergence of English national identity, as it first took shape in the struggle
of democratic Saxons against aristocratic Normans in the early Middle Ages – Ivanhoe – and then deepened and developed
through the early modern Tudor and Stuart periods. Here romantic medievalism
was given full rein, in fictions rife with melodramatic contrasts and
moralising stereotypes of the kind that rightly draw Jameson’s strictures. In
European terms, this was probably the most influential side of Scott’s work. On
the other hand, Scott was also the chronicler of the peculiar trajectory of his
native Scotland, a quite distinct society, within this larger story. Here a
completely different vision was at work, formed not so much by Romantic Schwärmerei, as by
the Scottish Enlightenment, whose theories of historical development as a
universal succession of stages, passing from hunter-gatherer to pastoral to
agricultural to commercial forms of society, Scott absorbed from Adam Ferguson
and Dugald Stewart and mapped onto his re-creation of the conflicts between
Highlands and Lowlands, clan and capital, in Waverley and its sequels. It was Scott’s
capacity to represent the tragic collision between historically distinct times
and their characteristic social forms – what Bloch would later callUngleichzeitigkeit – that commanded Lukács’s special
admiration, and lifts this part of Scott’s fiction above the moralisms of the
costume drama.
In Tolstoy’s case, we can find a very similar sense of
the tragic collision of non-synchronous worlds in his tales of tsarist
penetration of the Caucasus, above all in his last writing, Hadji Murad, the
masterpiece of his historical fiction. There we are shown, with an impassive,
laconic tautness closer to Babel or Hemingway than to any writer of his own
time, the utterly contrasting worlds of Russian imperialism and Chechen and
Avar clan and religious resistance to it, with their own divisions – each side
fully realised, with a magnificent economy of means, in a tale as modern as the
carnage in Chechnya today. In War and Peace, however, there is
an all but complete absence of any drama of this kind, since the conflict that
is nominally staged lacks any truly imagined adversary. Tolstoy, in effect,
makes no serious attempt to represent the French invader, but seeks rather to
obliterate it by devices of minimisation that stretch from a jejune cartoon of
Napoleon to voluble protestations that the Grande Armée’s whole expedition was
a meaningless affair. The consequence, inevitably, is something close to a
chauvinist tract, in which the enemy remains essentially abstract, not a
concrete figuration of two contending historical forces. It is partly for this
reason thatWar and Peace,
though undoubtedly (and despite Tolstoy’s own denials) a historical novel, set
in a period before the author’s lifetime, is so seldom considered primarily as
such today.
But there is another reason too. Setting aside the
insubstantiality of the French, even within the Russian society it depicts the
novel offers little sense of the passage of historical time: that is, of any
disconcerting contrast between the epoch of Alexander I, in which it is set,
and of Alexander II, in which it was written. At most, the use of French among
aristocrats acts as a generic signifier of difference. Otherwise, we are in a
kind of continuous present, a more or less eternal Russia in which the leading
characters perform much as if they were contemporaries of the author. It is
enough to look at Anna Karenina to see how far we are in the same
universe. War and Peace thus offers the curiosity of a
historical novel with a very weak sense of history, not because Tolstoy was
incapable of one – Hadji Murad shows the opposite – but because at
this point he was programmatically committed to treating major historical
conflicts as meaningless, in the homemade philosophy set out at such length in
the book itself.
What lifts the novel above the level of an
idiosyncratic – one might say: peculiarly know-nothing – version of romantic
nationalism is not just Tolstoy’s extraordinary gifts of observation, and sense
of panoramic construction, but the analytic psychology he learned from Rousseau
and (above all) Stendhal, whose role in his development as a writer might be
compared with that of Ferguson and Stewart in Scott, as the Enlightenment antidote
controlling and redeeming the melodrama of national salvation. The greatness of War and Peace lies here: in the side of Tolstoy,
closer to Laclos and Stendhal, that was relentlessly rationalist in his
dissection of motive and feeling. Of course, there is no clear-cut line of
division between the two registers of his writing. Much that is conventionally
‘romantic’ in a mediocre sense can be found even in his individual
characterisations, brilliant as many of these are. Natasha, for example, has many
of the traits of a chocolate-box heroine, the ‘poetic, graceful imp’ (inspired,
his sister-in-law reported, in part by Mrs Braddon’s ‘sensation novel’ Aurora Floyd),
whose fantasy function – at the time and since – as winsome vehicle of Russian
charm continues to produce such kitsch as Orlando Figes’s pot-boiling
celebration of the national culture, Natasha’s Dance. Pierre’s
lumbering progress into her arms is the weakest, because most moralistically
predictable, feature of the Bildungsroman that the novel also contains. But
such impurities are only a reminder of a larger, more constitutive
heterogeneity, not so much of this work as such, but of the genre of the
historical novel to which it can still be said to belong.
For if the historical novel began as a nation-building
exercise in the backwash of romantic reaction to the French Revolution and
Napoleonic expansion, the results varied according to context. The curious
emptiness of the political space of War and Peace is also a function of the fact that
the Russian Empire was an already constituted great power, which victory in
1812 simply conserved as it was. Behind the novel was not an impulse of
emancipation, but of displaced compensation. Smarting from Russian humiliation
in the Crimean War, where the troops of Napoleon III had stormed Sebastopol
under his eyes, and detesting the liberal intelligentsia that blamed the
country’s recent defeat on the backwardness of a society still resting on
serfdom, Tolstoy fixed on victory over Napoleon I as a salve for contemporary
morale, and a rebuff to the callow reformers of 1856 (‘treasonable hands that
would not hesitate to ignite the fires of revolt’), who had called for a prompt
emancipation of the serfs that he believed could only ‘end in them slaughtering
us’. Central to the purpose of the novel became the counter-projection of a
fictive unity of peasantry and aristocracy, repelling the foreign invader
despite a Frenchified court and (in reality) all too Germanic high command, to
be parodied or ignored. Historically speaking, the sublimation of a
retrospective revanchism could only yield what Shklovsky called the
canonisation of a legend. War and Peace remains a great novel; unlike most
other masterpieces of conservative imagination, however, fissured and weakened
by its political intentions, not strengthened by them.
Elsewhere, writers were less ideologically driven. In
Germany, Fontane started a historical novel about the campaign of 1812-13, Vor dem Sturm, a
year before Tolstoy published his. It even includes the memories of a Prussian
officer who had fought at Borodino on the other side, with the Grande Armée.
But Fontane’s patriotism was free of any jingoist spirit, respectful of French
adversaries and critical of Prussian defects. The Prussian reformers, learning
the lessons of defeat by Napoleon at Jena, had started to modernise the state
as Alexander I did not. Fontane’s pendant to Tolstoy thus inverts its schema.
Its aristocratic heroes raise French-style volunteers to fight the French as
they retreat from Russia, only to find that, in a dialectical irony, habits of
Prussian discipline still make this militia too rigid to prevail against them.
In Spain, Galdós’s Episodios nacionales likewise followed the struggle against
Napoleon, but could move to the liberal revolution and absolutist reaction that
was intertwined with it in a way that Tolstoy could not. By any measure the
greatest monument to the form ever produced – a chain of 46 novels written over
40 years – it was set off by the disappointments of the Spanish Revolution of
1868, whose roots Galdós traced to the war that had reclaimed the nation’s
independence. In a panorama unsparing of his country’s defects, without a hint
of sentimentality about its nobility or its peasantry, or the frailties of its reformers,
a reasoned patriotism and pessimism were conjoined.
In Northern Italy, where French rule was often more
appreciated than detested, there was no national reaction against the First
Empire, so Manzoni – author of a famous ode to Napoleon – had to situate I Promessi Sposi much further back in time, during
Spanish rule over Milan in the 17th century, avoiding any too remote
antiquarianism while offering a parable of popular life to stir patriotic
feeling against Austrian dominion in the time of the Holy Alliance. The logic
of this international pattern can be seen a contrario from the case of France, where for
obvious reasons no comparable historical narrative could be constructed.
Strictly construed, the nearest equivalent – noted by Lukács – would be the
regional drama of Balzac’s Chouans, a Vendéen version of
Scott’s Highlanders. But the centrepiece of romantic historical fiction in
France was, of course, Notre Dame de Paris, whose
medieval phantasmagoria, free-floating sentimentalism and detective story
motifs place it completely outside the ranks of the classic historical novel as
Lukács defined it. Yet this oddity presaged a more pregnant multiplication of
the genre.
In the next generation, France became the leading
exporter of the costume drama sans phrases, with the
extraordinary career of Alexandre Dumas, though England was not far behind with
Harrison Ainsworth and G.P.R. James. It was at this point that the historical
novel started to acquire its modern ambiguity. Most literary genres have included
a variety of registers, and as the Russian Formalists always emphasised, their
vitality has typically depended on interactions between high and low, elite and
popular forms, either in a circuit within the genre, or via diagonal
connections across them. At the same time, the dominant pole within a genre
will usually be fairly clear-cut – Symbolist poetry, let’s say, lying at the
elite end of the spectrum, thrillers at the popular end. The peculiarity of the
historical novel, however, has been to elude any stable stratification of high
and low. Its evolution exhibits rather an oscillating continuum of registers,
including – to use for a moment anachronistic terms – not just ‘highbrow’ and
‘lowbrow’ but also importantly ‘middlebrow’ ranges of work. It is the extent of
this continuum that arguably sets it apart from other narrative forms.
The reason this may be so appears to lie in the nature
of its subject matter. For Lukács, the historical novel was essentially epic in
form. It was an extensive representation, in Hegelian terms, of the ‘totality
of objects’, as opposed to the more concentrated ‘totality of movement’ proper
to drama. But if this is a plausible description of the origins of the form, it
cannot account for its diffusion. There, it was not an aspiration to epic
totality that would ensure the enormous popularity of fictions about the past,
but rather the pre-constituted repertoire of scenes or stories of that history,
still overwhelmingly written from the standpoint of battles, conspiracies, intrigues,
treacheries, seductions, infamies, heroic deeds and deathless sacrifices –
everything that was not prosaic daily life in the 19th century. Here was the
road, so to speak, from Jeanie Deans to Milady. The historical novel that
conquered European reading publics in the second half of the 19th century would
not offend patriotic sentiment, but no longer had a nation-building vocation. The Three Musketeers and its innumerable imitations were
entertainment literature.
Side by side with it, persisted ‘high’ forms of the
genre. Now, however, the typical development was for leading authors to try
their hand at the historical novel, composing one or two such works in a corpus
otherwise devoted to realistic representations of contemporary life. Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, Henry Esmond, Romola and Salammbô illustrate this pattern. Lower down,
but still above the stratum of Dumas or Ainsworth, figured writers like
Stevenson and Bulwer-Lytton. The central fact to grasp, however (the evidence
for this is graphically laid out in Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel),
is that the historical novel as a genre predominated massively over all other
forms of narrative down to the Edwardian era. It combined enormous market
success with continuing aesthetic prestige. In the last season of the Belle
Epoque, Anatole France was publishing Les Dieux ont soif, Ford Madox
Ford his Fifth Queen; even Conrad would end
his career with a couple of historical fictions, set once more in Napoleonic
times.
Twenty
years later, the scene was utterly changed. By the interwar period, the
historical novel had become déclassé, falling precipitously out of the ranks of
serious fiction. There were two body blows to its position in the hierarchy of
genres. One was the massacres of the First World War, which stripped the
glamour from battles and high politics, discrediting malignant foes and
sacrificial heroes alike. Staged by both sides in 1914 as a gigantic historical
contest between good and evil, the war left the survivors with a terrible
hangover from melodrama. The swashbuckling fare of Weyman or Sabatini looked
risible from the trenches. But there was also the critical effect of the rise
of modernism, broadly construed, to which Jameson has rightly drawn our
attention. He points to its primacy of perception as incompatible with
totalising retrospect, rendering impossible a modernist version of the kind of
historical novel theorised by Lukács. To this could be added its hostility to
the corrupting effects of aesthetic facility – to all that was too readily or
immediately available – which struck down the popular and middlebrow versions
of the historical novel still more stringently.
Thus if we look at the interwar scene, the historical
novel becomes a recessive form, at virtually all levels, in Europe. In the
United States, on the other hand, shielded from the shock of the war, Faulkner
produced a Gothic variant, flinching before no melodramatic licence, in Absalom, Absalom,
while at a less ambitious level its middle range flourished as never before –
Thornton Wilder, for example, enjoying a reputation that would have seemed odd
in Europe. More spectacularly, Gone with the Wind, a tale of
Civil War and Reconstruction with a lightweight resemblance to the romantic
nation-building fiction of the previous century, became the most successful
historical novel of all time. Significantly, what Europe produced in this
middle market mode was principally Robert Graves’s I Claudius, the
mental escape of a First World War veteran into antiquity, later fodder for a
slack television serial. At a higher level, similar reflexes generated a
cluster of historical novels by German exiles – the elder Mann, Döblin, Broch,
Brecht – in which Fascism was allegorised into the past, as the rise of Julius
Caesar, mobs howling for Augustus, or the killers of the Catholic League, in a
deliberately modernising spirit completely at variance with the classical
conception of the historical novel.
If this was an enclave with few consequences, two
works of the interwar period appear by contrast as signposts to the future. One
is perhaps the only work that defies Jameson’s judgment that a modernist
historical novel would be impossible, although it is certainly true that it
makes no attempt at that ‘sense of a historian’s interpretive commentary on
events’ whose absence, he argues, debars Döblin’s Wallenstein – its ferocious canvas of absurdity
designed after the senseless slaughter of the First World War – from such a
title. This jeu d’esprit was Orlando, whose metamorphoses of
time and gender, breaking with every realist norm, occupy a niche in the
development of the genre comparable, in its proleptic isolation, to Michael Kohlhaas on the eve of its classical form.
Woolf was a modernist par excellence. That an older realist tradition was not
extinguished, but still capable of a remarkable reassertion, was shown by
Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, which appeared in
1932. This great novel, which Lukács came to admire, answers to all his
criteria save one, which it pointedly reverses. Lukács believed that the true
historical novel was carried by a sense of progress, such as had carried Scott.
Once this disappeared after 1848, decline to a vitiated antiquarianism set in. The Radetzky March demonstrated the opposite. For Roth’s
epic traces the decay of the multinational Habsburg Empire and its dominant
class with a clarity and artistry equal, if not superior, to any progressivist
19th-century forebear. A deep historical pessimism proved no bar to a
magisterial representation of the totality of objects. Simply, in this reversal
the nation-state that was once the ideal horizon of the classical historical
novel figures in the novel’s sequel, The Emperor’s Tomb, as the end
point of a social and moral collapse – the shrunken, riven Austria of the
Depression and the Heimwehr when these works were composed.
Roth’s achievement attracted little notice at the
time. The Second World War, when it came, reinforced the effects of the first.
The flow of historical fiction at the lowest levels of the genre, reduced but
even in Europe never interrupted, swelled again as mass literary markets
expanded with the postwar boom: in Britain hoary sagas of doughty patriots
battling against Napoleon poured – and still pour – off the presses, from C.S.
Forester through Dennis Wheatley to Patrick O’Brian. Over time, this output has
yielded a teeming universe that can be glimpsed in such omnibus guides as What Historical Novel Do I Read
Next?, with its capsule descriptions of more than 6000 titles, and
league tables of the most popular historical periods, favoured geographical
settings and, last but not least, ‘top historical characters’ – Henry VIII and
Jesus Christ tie for fourth place.
But the larger and more indiscriminate this stratum
became, the lower the depths to which the historical novel was consigned as a
respectable literary form. In 1951 it came as something of a shock when
Marguerite Yourcenar won the Prix Fémina forMémoires d’Hadrien,
so completely out of season did historical fiction of any kind – even such a
strange anomaly as this one – seem in the true republic of letters. Did people
still write that sort of thing? The profound discredit into which the genre had
fallen was made clear by the initial reception of what remains in retrospect
the greatest historical novel of the century, Lampedusa’s Leopard. Initially
rejected for publication, even when it appeared it was greeted with bafflement
by Italian critics. How could such an old-fashioned piece of work have been
produced in the contemporary world? Should it be taken seriously as literature?
In fact, what Lampedusa had done was to take the same
theme as Roth – the fate of an aristocracy in a dying absolutist order, amid
the rise of romantic nationalism – to yet grander conclusions, in a verdict of
pitiless detachment on the nation-building process in Italy, the adjustments of
the old order in Sicily to it, and the fate of individuals at the crossroads
between them, viewed in the light of eternity. Here, the interlocking of
historical and existential registers that for Lukács and Jameson defines this
form, found supreme expression in the counterpointing of the futile survival of
a class and the cosmic extinction of an individual embodying it. Far from being
a throwback to Victorian models, the sudden elongation of the novel’s
conclusion, jumping 20 years forward to the final disintegration of the
taxidermic familiar of the prince, marks The Leopard as a distinctively modern masterpiece.
Strikingly, in the same years that Lampedusa was
composing his portrait of the Risorgimento in Palermo, not so far away in the
Mediterranean a historical novel was moving in the opposite direction. Naguib
Mahfouz’s Cairene Trilogy, depicting semi-colonial Egypt from the rise of the
Wafd at the end of the First World War to the activity of Muslim Brothers and
Communists during the Second through the story of a bourgeois family, was
written under Farouk, and only saw the light of day after the monarchy had been
overthrown, in the Sturm und Drang of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and
the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. Mahfouz had begun as a writer of
pure costume dramas, Egyptian-style – that is, fanciful romances set in
pharaonic antiquity. With the Cairene Trilogy he became a historical novelist
such as Lukács has conceived one: real historical figures interwoven with
fictional characters, middling heroes, a sense of popular life, and – last but
not least – a powerful underlying narrative of progress, however halting or
ambiguous, towards national emancipation, even if in this case, technically a Zeitroman,
overlapping with his own lifetime. Here it was language rather than prejudice
that isolated his work, unknown to the non-Arabophone world till its
translation into French many years later.
A
reclusive semi-Belgian, a dead Sicilian, an obscure Egyptian. That was about
where the historical novel lay, a few antique jewels on a huge mound of trash,
for some 30 years after the war. Then, abruptly, the scene changed, in one of
the most astonishing transformations in literary history. Today, the historical
novel has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more widespread than it was
even at the height of its classical period in the early 19th century. This
resurrection has also famously been a mutation. The new forms signal the
arrival of the postmodern. To discuss these with due amplitude would require
another occasion. The postmodern turn has, of course, extended across virtually
all the arts, with local effects distinctive to each of them. But if we
consider its morphology in the literary field, there seems little doubt that
the most striking single change it has wrought in fiction is the pervasive
recasting of it around the past. Since postmodernism was famously defined, by
Jameson himself, as the aesthetic regime of an ‘age that has forgotten how to
think historically’, the resurrection of the historical novel might seem
paradoxical. But this is a second coming with a difference. Now, virtually
every rule of the classical canon, as spelled out by Lukács, is flouted or
reversed. Among other traits, the historical novel reinvented for postmoderns
may freely mix times, combining or interweaving past and present; parade the
author within the narrative; take leading historical figures as central rather
than marginal characters; propose counterfactuals; strew anachronisms; multiply
alternative endings; traffic with apocalyptics. By no means all the historical
novels in the vast range produced by accredited writers in the past 30 years
exhibit these features. But the core of the revival has typically displayed
some or most of them, while around it more traditional forms have proliferated
too.
How are we to understand the aetiology of these
forms? In a wonderful passage, Jameson speculates that the function of their
‘exaggerated inventions of a fabulous and non-existent past (and future)’ is 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’. This is a powerful suggestion. But it raises the question of its
possessive pronoun. Who is the ‘we’ of such loss of temporality, that
extinction of a sense of history which is ours? Are the postmodern forms of the
historical novel effectively universal today?
Certainly, if we were to make a roll-call of all
those contemporary novelists who have in one respect or another contributed to
the new explosion of invented pasts, the list would stretch around the world,
from North America to Europe to Russia to the Subcontinent to Japan to the
Caribbean and Latin America. In that sense, such forms have become as global as
the postmodern itself. But if we want to track the emergence of the mutation
that has produced them, and venture beyond an inventory to their taxonomy, we
probably need to consider the spatial organisation of this universe.
No aesthetic
timespan is ever homogeneous. The dominance of postmodern forms in the past 30
years did not, and could not, displace all others. At the opposite ends of
Asia, something like the classical imagination of the historical novel lived
on, producing in Indonesia and Arabia two remarkable cycles of nationalist
fiction that can be regarded as, in their way, cousins of Mahfouz: Pramoedya
Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, composed between 1975 and 1985, and
Abdelrahman Munif’s quintet, Cities of Salt, written in the 1980s
and already much freer in its handling of time and probability. These are
novels, each starting at the turn of the 20th century, written directly out of
the experience of Dutch and American imperialism. But they are outliers within
the universe of postmodern re-creations of the past. To follow these, we must
cross the oceans.
For in point of
origin, there is little doubt where meta-historical fiction began. It was born
in the Caribbean with Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The
Kingdom of This World), which appeared in 1949, followed by his Siglo
de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) of 1962. Settings:
Haiti, Cuba, French Guyana. Five years later came García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Over the next 30 years, Latin American
historical fiction became a torrent, with many tributaries beyond Carpentier
and García Márquez: Roa Bastos, Carlos Fuentes, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Fernando
del Paso, Mario Vargas Llosa and many more. Here, unquestionably, was the
pacemaker for the global diffusion of these forms, which, like the concept of the
postmodern itself, were invented in the periphery. Not that sources in the
centre were entirely missing from it: Carpentier was steeped in French
surrealism; Orlando, translated by Borges, put García Márquez into
a fever. But clearly, it was the historical experience of Latin America itself
that gave birth to these imaginings of its past. The question is: what
experience?
If we set aside individual precursors, the
collective take-off of these forms dates from the early 1970s and what they
transcribe, essentially, is an experience of defeat: history as what, for all
its heroics, lyricism and colour, went wrong in the continent – the discarding
of democracies, the crushing of guerrillas, the spread of military tyrannies,
the disappearances and tortures, of that period. Hence the centrality of
dictator novels in this cluster of writing. The distorted, fantastical shapes
of an alternative past, according to this reading, would stem from the thwarted
hopes of the present, as so many reflections, admonitions or consolations. It
is difficult to deny all force to this diagnosis. But we should remember that
the themes of Carpentier’s two originating works themselves, written long
before the grim years of continental slaughter and repression, were the Haitian
Revolution and the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. These
novels, founding texts of magical realism, do not minimise the disappointments
and betrayals that overtook each – and which occupy much of the narrative – but
their drive is wholly affirmative. The first appeared in the year the Chinese
Revolution triumphed; the second just after the Bay of Pigs. Their relationship
to the consolidated forms of the fiction they set in motion poses an
interesting problem. Could Saramago, a historical novelist whose belated career
was ignited by the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, be regarded as a collateral
descendant of this now otherwise stranded moment of inception?
In the United
States, by contrast, if we consider the span of historical novels of one sort or
another produced in the same period, the core experiences triggering the
American branch of the phenomenon would appear to be race (Styron, Morrison,
Doctorow, Walker) and empire (Vidal, Pynchon, DeLillo, Mailer, Sontag). Here
the most distinctive paradigm has been society as conspiracy, not the
ostentatious dictator, but the secret network as the hidden ossature of
rule: The Crying of Lot 49,Harlot’s Ghost, Gravity’s
Rainbow, Underworld – a literature of paranoia offering
its own kind of black-magical realism. In Europe, on the other hand, it has
been, not the CIA, but the Third Reich and the Judeocide that have polarised
historical imagination: Grass, Tournier, Sebald. England, relatively untouched
by the Second World War, has generated instead mostly Victoriana – Fowles,
Farrell, Ackroyd, Byatt, Carey (an Australian extension) – or reversions to the
much more traumatic First World War, as in Pat Barker’s trilogy.
Military tyranny; race murder; omnipresent
surveillance; technological war; and programmed genocide. The persistent
backdrops to the historical fiction of the postmodern period are at the
antipodes of its classical forms. Not the emergence of the nation, but the
ravages of empire; not progress as emancipation, but impending or consummated
catastrophe. In Joycean terms, history as a nightmare from which we still
cannot wake up. But if we look, not at the sources or themes of this
literature, but at its forms, Jameson suggests we should reverse the judgment.
The postmodern revival, by throwing verisimilitude to the winds, fabricating
periods and outraging probabilities, ought rather to be seen as a desperate
attempt to waken us to history, in a time when any real sense of it has gone
dead.
Still, he concludes, in just these conditions does
not the Lukácsian connection between great social events and the existential
fate of individuals remain typically out of reach? Benjamin, who detested the
idea of progress nurtured by 19th-century historicism, would not have been
surprised, or perhaps felt much regret. He used yet another image of awakening.
The angel of history is moving away from something he stares at. ‘Where a chain
of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed.’ Part of the impulse
behind the contemporary historical novel may also lie here.
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