On Historical Fiction
Paul Theroux on Orwell, lunching with Michel Houellebecq, the Iranian embassy hostage crisis revisited, heroin and jazz, and more.
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In The Nation, Alexander Manshel makes what initially appears to be an aesthetic argument. Toni Morrison’s Beloved was a ground-breaking novel, but one result of its success is that it inspired a generation of minority writers (encouraged by publishers) to focus on the past, which, in turn, has proved limiting:
When Beloved became a finalist for the National Book Award in the late 1980s, Morrison was one of only a handful of Black novelists to be short-listed for the prize in the decades since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man won it in the early 1950s. Whereas Invisible Man opens with the protagonist being expelled from college, following him as he is employed to paint the world “Optic White,” Beloved closes with Morrison’s own young protagonist, Denver, at the precipice of college admission, so that she might write a different story with the ink her mother, Sethe, was forced to make. While the tale the invisible man tells is his own, its setting the contemporary world in which he lives, Denver’s narrative is one of (what Morrison calls) rememory, of grappling with the world that came before her.
Though neither Morrison nor Beloved inaugurated a shift in literary value single-handedly, novel and novelist alike came to exemplify it for a generation of readers, teachers, scholars, and writers that followed. One way of understanding the cultural history of the last five decades is as the story of how American literature moved from Ellison to Morrison to where we are now—of how, in other words, the past came to supplant the present in contemporary American fiction.
One reason the “past came to supplant the present” in contemporary fiction is that revisiting it became a way of exploring a particular political agenda:
In the 1980s and 1990s, Fredric Jameson argued that one of the many failings of contemporary historical fiction was its “omnivorous…historicism,” its “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past.” More than 20 years later, Jameson doubled down on that claim in an essay titled “The Historical Novel Today, or, Is It Still Possible?” He lamented that “the historical novel seems doomed to make arbitrary selections from the great menu of the past, so many differing and colorful segments or periods catering to the historicist taste, and all now…more or less equal in value.” Yet this critique fails to register just how selective—one might even say discerning—writers and readers have been when it comes to their appetites for history.
Though the historical settings of contemporary American fiction are as diverse as the authors who create them, a significant portion of this work falls within a highly specific constellation of historical subgenres: contemporary narratives of slavery, Holocaust fiction and the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, narratives of immigration, and the novel of recent history.
Testifying to the prominence of these individual subgenres, many notable novels in the last decade have fallen under the rubric of not one, but two or more of them. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, for example, chronicles the history of Japanese airmen during World War II, as well as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is a multigenerational novel that narrates two halves of a family tree divided by enslavement, but reunited by way of immigration two centuries later. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom is a World War II novel, a multigenerational family saga, and a novel of recent history that follows three generations of a Black family living in New Orleans from the 1940s, through the 1980s, to the period just after Hurricane Katrina.
But the upshot for Manshel is that minority writing has become too “narrow”:
[C]onsider Cora, the protagonist of Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, who escapes enslavement only to find that the sole employment available to her is playing an enslaved woman in a white-owned museum. As that novel makes clear, when the only job in town is historical reenactment, representing the past can seem more like a trap than a means of getting free.
This might lead one to the conclusion that publishers should stop worrying about politics and take more risks on original writing. But Manshel seems less concerned with how this focus on the past has limited aesthetic freedom and more concerned with how it has limited political action. “Understanding the past is a necessary,” he writes, “but ultimately insufficient condition for effecting change in the present.” More:
Over the last five decades, a number of literary institutions have inadvertently encouraged the belief that history can act as the central staging ground for issues of contemporary injustice and inequality . . . Given fiction’s extraordinary capacity to resuscitate the past, these institutions have at times mistaken historical recovery for a form of historical redress.
I don’t think Manshel is suggesting here that publishers stop using fiction to push a particular political agenda. Rather, he seems to be suggesting that fiction should do more than just represent past injustices. It should remedy them.
If that’s the case, I am curious to know how it would do this. Manshel implies that setting works in the present (or nearer the present, since all art is about the past, even if it is the past of last week) will “effect change.” But will it? Why does he think that these works would be any less of a re-presentation of life—or “resuscitation,” to use his word—than works of so-called historical fiction?
He is right that contemporary fiction feels narrow. But does it feel narrow because so many works are set it the distant past? Or does it feel narrow because so many works are always only about racial or sexual “injustice and inequality”?
Speaking of fiction, Tunku Varadarajan talks to Paul Theroux about his novel on Orwell’s time in Burma: “My novel arose from my lifelong reading of Orwell and was stimulated by the timidity of biographers in speculating on his life in Burma. Orwell was also full of contradictions—I alluded to his belief that Indians were incapable of ruling themselves. He thought Stalin was diabolical but Hitler a sort of Sad Sack and clown. After Burma he lived a life of atonement, and I always asked: What was he atoning for?—and found many examples and experiences that shamed him. If you read all the works of a particular author, you know that person well.”
Magdalena Miecznicka “lunches” with Michel Houellebecq at Maison Péret at Paris’s 14th arrondissement: “He’s bang on time for lunch — which is to say he arrives at 6pm. ‘I can’t have a meal without drinking wine,’ he had explained in a brief email exchange before our encounter. ‘After that, it’s all over, I can’t stop drinking, so I try to delay the fateful hour.’” More:
The big political story in France this year has been the challenge from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National, or RN). After the far-right party’s strong performance in European elections in June, Macron called a snap parliamentary election. The RN won fewer seats than expected in the Assemblée Nationale, coming third as leftwing and centrist parties rallied together, some of their candidates pulling out to boost the chances of candidates most likely to beat the far right. Houellebecq calls this “blocking” of the RN “disturbing”.
The elites, he says, think of people as ploucs. “In America the equivalent is hillbilly.” Does he actually like hillbillies? I ask. He takes a while to consider. “Yes,” he says finally, but he pleads to not having any friends among the category. “I’m faithful to my class.”
He’s a great admirer of Christopher Lasch, an American historian who argued that modern global elites have more in common with each other than the poorer people from their own countries. “He was ahead of his time,” says Houellebecq. These elites are harder to dismantle than the nobility, he muses. “Nobility had nothing to explain their right to stay in power, apart from their birth. Contemporary elites claim intellectual and moral superiority.”
Dropping acid with Aldous Huxley: “Around Christmas Eve 1955, Alfred Matthew Hubbard turned Aldous Huxley on to LSD. Their meeting took place at Huxley’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Seemingly from different universes, these two figures found a curious point of convergence via lysergic acid diethylamide . . . Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who’d moved to Canada in 1951, arranged the meeting, at Huxley’s request.”
Doing heroin with John Coltrane: “New York was postwar America’s jazz capital and its capital of drug commerce and consumption. Had New Orleans, another port city, become a heroin hub in the 1910s, Dixieland jazz doubtless would have been as associated with drugs as was bebop, the leading postwar jazz mode. Policing the narcotics flow into New York Harbor posed many of the same challenges that agents now face on the Mexican border. Not all that drug traffic was destined for points inland. Estimates made at the time by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics found that half of all heroin addicts in America around the time were New York–based. Of that cohort, a substantial share were in Harlem.”
Brian Stewart reviews Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq:
Saddam Hussein was known for wielding many notorious instruments of power; the pen was not one. But the Iraqi tyrant had a penchant for composing literature, if that’s the word I want, in the service of national and Baathist propaganda.
Hussein’s literary endeavors—his “secret garden,” as his press secretary referred to his furtive scribblings—took the form of crude narratives expressed in a discursive style replete with Arabic proverbs and Koranic verses. His literary output did not produce refined poetry or prose, but the author’s absolute power ensured a wide domestic distribution. The principal themes of Saddam’s fables were not hard to discern: the existence of a foreign conspiracy to subjugate the Arab people; the need for violent resistance to thwart that conspiracy; and the nobility of death in that cause.
In March 2003, amid the collapsing scenery of a morbid regime in its denouement, Hussein worked at a frenetic pace to complete a work of fiction. He put the finishing touches on an allegorical historical novel set on the periphery of the Roman Empire. His fourth and final novel was raced to the presses to rally the nation to armed insurgency (40,000 copies managed to get printed). Known under various titles, Get Out, You Damned One! tells of a noble patriarch named Ibrahim with three grandsons, who represent Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a morality tale with cosmically evil Jews, feckless Christians, and upright Muslims. The Jew worships a bag of gold coins and practices brigandage with the backing of the imperial Romans, but his “desperate tribe” is eventually routed by a band of righteous Arab fighters.
This fable is dredged up by the journalist Steve Coll in The Achilles Trap, an engrossing history of Saddam Hussein and his long war against the Pax Americana.
Andrew Anthony reviews Ben Macintyre’s “exhaustive” and “gripping” account of the Iranian embassy hostage crisis: “Macintrye, who has written a number of bestsellers on espionage and the special forces, is a seasoned documenter of the British establishment’s cloaked histories. His retelling of Kim Philby’s betrayal – A Spy Among Friends – is one of the most enthralling accounts of a double agent’s ruthless deception . . . Here, he brings the same deft storyteller’s skill to what is a more complex and thought-provoking narrative than the one popularised by the siege’s dramatic conclusion.”
Peter Tonguette considers the advantages of the landline: “My Luddism is largely accidental. It isn’t that I chose to use a landline out of obstinacy but that I never stopped using it . . . Later, when seemingly the entire population converted to smartphones, I saw that my reliance on landlines had advantages. If a call gets disconnected, or someone can’t hear me, I am never the responsible party; it’s always the person on the other side, invariably a mobile phone user. When I am away, I am truly away. I have never had a ringing phone interrupt a movie. I schedule my calls when I know I will be at home, and those wishing to reach me when I am not will have to wait. When I wrote for my metro daily newspaper, I had an informal agreement with my editor: on deadline day, I told him if I was going to be away from my desk (and thus my phone) for any length of time.”
Exceptionally wonderful today.