Every Novel Is Historical: A Conversation

Gavin McCrea: Classifications are always problematic, those of fiction no less than any other. (The term “fiction” itself is not without its own complications.) But I do think “historical fiction” is a particularly troublesome category, one that warrants energetic and sustained criticism.

Marguerite Yourcenar offers what is, to my knowledge, the finest—finest because the most radical—example of such criticism. In her “Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian,” often published as a coda to her 1951 masterpiece, Yourcenar argues that those who use the classification historical fiction are ignoring the fact that all novels, whatever their temporal setting—be it the recent past, the distant past or indeed an imagined future—are necessarily, inescapably historical. What novels do, she says, is interpret a certain number of past events; the memories a novel contains, whether consciously or unconsciously recalled, whether personal or impersonal, are fabricated by the same stuff as history itself. There is no novel, she suggests, that is more “historical” than another: “Flaubert painstakingly rebuilds a Carthaginian palace by charging his description with hundreds of minute details, thus employing essentially the same method as for his picture of Yonville, a village of his own time and of his own Normandy.”

This is where I would like to begin our conversation, Danielle: with the question of whether the term “historical fiction” has any use or value to us as fiction writers. Is a novel set in the 1980s “historical”? Or a novel set in 2013 post-crash Ireland, for instance? As Yourcenar points out, fiction cannot claim to represent the present; it can only ever be about that which is always already past. Maybe, then, rather than approaching history as temporal, we should approach it as spatial: Fiction would be “historical” when it is concerned with the ways in which individuals’ material bodies and sense of self are bound up with apparently immaterial, selfless forces (economic markets; patterns of repression and resistance; familial, social, and governmental discipline, etc.). Conceived spatially, the “historical” in fiction would not be a question of when something is happening; instead it would be a question of where it is happening: Where is history impinging upon my body? Where in space am I experiencing history? Where does my history end and the history of my family, community, or nation begin? Because all fiction asks these questions in some way or another, this would put all fiction into the category “historical.”

Of course, the other thing to do would be to erase the category altogether. Yet I ask myself whether my fiction would be possible—whether I would have thought to write what I have written, and whether I would have written as I did—without it. To claim that the category is false is not to get rid of it but to claim to know something about it: Is it my knowledge of the category’s falseness that enables my fiction?

Danielle Dutton: To begin with the beginning of your comment, Gavin, and this idea of artificial distinctions: I think what’s wonky about the term “historical fiction” is that it classifies a book based solely on subject matter. For me this is always going to be an unsatisfying way to come at things, since I’m interested in conversations about form and style. I find it so frustrating, for example, when a book reviewer offers a glorified plot summary—I want to know about the way the book was written. Actually, this strikes me as peculiarly problematic when we’re dealing with historical fiction, in that so many reviews of historical novels often deal much more with the subject’s life and times than the novel itself. I digress! My point is that, as a category, historical fiction feels nearly useless when it’s used to label books as stylistically disparate as Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth, and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander.

I’m not sure what the solution might be, or if it really warrants a solution (energetic and sustained criticism—yes!), and I like your final question: Would you have thought to write Mrs. Engels if the category historical fiction didn’t exist? I’d like to think the answer is yes, but maybe that’s ludicrous. In general, when I teach, say, I find rules/categories/genre distinctions quite generative. They’re useful to push against. And yet . . . early in the writing of Margaret the First, it never occurred to me that I was writing historical fiction. I seem to remember that when it did I found the idea diminishing, as if someone could then dismiss my book as just one of those. So I suppose I’m just reiterating the inherent problem with categories and saying, “Yeah.”

This has me thinking about a recent trip I made to Caltech where I sat in on a class that had just finished reading my book. The students, all science majors, asked a lot of smart questions, but my favorite was from one young woman who was clearly struggling to articulate (or admit?) what she wanted to say, which was, essentially: “Why would anyone ever write a historical fiction?” We laughed, but when pressed she seemed to be asking why I’d chosen to write a novel about a person who’d existed, rather than making up a character like a fiction writer is “supposed” to do. If I wanted to write about Margaret Cavendish, why didn’t I write a biography or a scholarly text? I thought it was a wonderful question . . . getting into all sorts of weird nuances about fiction and history, what characters are, how the imagination works and what it works toward, etc. There seems to be this impression “out there” that what a historical novelist is doing is very different from what any other novelist is doing, and I guess I don’t think that’s true.

Gavin McCrea: With Mrs. Engels, I did not set out to write anything more than fiction. I did suspect, however, that the novel was going to be considered more “historical” than some other novels. When it was published, and I began to hear the kind of question you mention—“Why bother?”—my suspicions were confirmed: I had written something that I was expected to be able to defend. And thinking back—it is really only thinking historically that I can say this—the impulse to defend my work in advance from the often derogatory connotations of the category “historical fiction” must have influenced some of the stylistic choices I made while writing it. (Does the formal and linguistic boldness of your Margaret the First also represent a kind of pre-emptive strike?)

The same defensiveness comes across in Yourcenar’s “Reflection.” It is what drives her, I think, to her radical conclusions. Yourcenar exposes the falsity of the distinction between “personal” history (what is remembered of our own lives, what is experienced by “ordinary” people, the stuff that fiction writers are “supposed” to write about) and “impersonal” history (what is remembered of other people’s lives, what was experienced by the extraordinary agents of history, the stuff that fiction writers have no right to be playing with). She claims—and having read her novel, I believe her—that the facts of her own father’s life are less known to her than those of the life of her subject, the Emperor Hadrian, who has been dead for two thousand years. Moreover—and here is where she gets properly bolshie—she professes to have established as profound a bond with Hadrian as she has with her own self.

If she were to make an account of her own existence, she explains, it would be reconstructed from external sources, as if it were the life of someone else, and to do this she would have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify uncertain memories, and to replace those that have been lost. In order to give herself a history, she would have to undertake the same task of remembrance and recovery as she did when writing her novel about Hadrian. She would, in a sense, have to write a novel of herself. And in this novel about herself, she would also be Hadrian because, having imagined Hadrian’s history, he has become part of her own history, and therefore part of her self. Her memories of Hadrian are, she says, “neither more nor less than the memories of my own life.”

Through Hadrian, Yourcenar comes to understand that the images that she sees in her mind also come to her through others’ eyes; the voices she hears come spoken by others; her thoughts come already thought. “Everyone who has gone through the adventure of living is myself,” she says.

A bold phrase. A brilliant phrase. And one that comes already spoken by another. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert once said, and I recall him saying this even though there is no proof that he actually ever did. I do not need proof, it seems, in order to attribute words to him and thereby make him part of Yourcenar’s memory. And I do not need Flaubert’s or Yourcenar’s permission, I notice, to make them part of my own memory. I remember them, and they already are.

So here is a proposition for you, Danielle: Fiction is what happens when I remember that, in the moment of remembering, I am what I remember. Now I am Flaubert. Now I am Yourcenar. To believe, now, that I am something else, something other—that is the historical fiction.

Are you, or have you ever been, Margaret Cavendish?

Danielle Dutton: Oui, Margaret Cavendish, c’est moi!

It’s so much easier to be romantic in French. I mean, I love what you’re saying about Yourcenar here, but I guess it feels a little sensational to me to claim I am or ever have been Margaret Cavendish—inasmuch as I do feel it’s true, I feel it in the same way I do about Jane Eyre. This is the magic of literature, right? Am I supposed to feel something inherently different because Cavendish once lived off the page? But . . . oh, I’m just not sure about this question. I’ve lately been working to understand the Buddhist idea of no-self. Maybe I am Margaret Cavendish. Maybe you are too.

As for whether or not I made stylistic choices to push against historical fiction itself, or expectations readers might have about the genre . . . no, I don’t think so. I’m not sure I knew enough about those expectations to push against them very thoughtfully. One review of my book did warn readers of historical fiction not to expect much sex. I totally blew it in the bodice-ripping department.

But if anything I’d say my book became more “traditional” as I went along. Partly this is because when I first conceive of a project I usually have pretty weird ideas about it. When I conceived of my first novel S P R A W L, for example, it was completely sculptural to me, and so the question became how to create that shape within the confines of a book. When I was beginning to write about the seventeenth century, I really wished my book could be a series of small boxes, and when you opened them there would be a different garden inside each one, something like a very elaborate music box, but when you turned the crank on the side of the box, instead of a ballerina turning, a tiny scene would take place in the garden, and the book would be the accumulation of these small, beautiful incidents. I tried, for a while—read a bunch about box hedges and gazon coupé shapes—but the longer I worked at it the more interested I became in Cavendish, who was originally going to be just one character in one of the gardens.

I’m curious whether you’re working on something new, Gavin, and, if so, if it’s historical or not, and, if not, if writing it does feel in some way essentially different from writing Mrs. Engels (or not).

Gavin McCrea: I cannot say the same for my book: lots of sex! At an event recently, on stage in front of around fifty people, I had a straight-faced conversation with an elderly lady about the historical accuracy of my description of Friedrich Engels’s penis. (Engels, c’est moi! Actually, that is not true, Engels ce n’est pas moi, his penis looks nothing like mine. Or does it?)

I experienced Margaret the First precisely as you describe, as a series of boxes, each opening onto a vivid (vivid because purposefully delimited) scene. Whatever concessions you made to “tradition” certainly did not eradicate this impression of magic boxes—containing magic voices—opening and shutting.

Final form is an important consideration for me, too: not just the penis but the whole body. I imagined Mrs. Engels as three large panels (sections) into which were fitted a series of carved reliefs (chapters), like a narrative frieze or the stations of the cross. I have a particular interest in triptychs and patterns of three (Mrs. Engels has a three-part structure and is itself part of a trilogy). The number three is essential to our ways of telling history. Our narratives of the past would be inconceivable without the tripartite structure to fit them in: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or, if you like, empire, revolution, democracy.

Most of my ideas come when I am lost in critical questions, in the “weird” thinking that you describe. Jumping into philosophical loops (e.g. is it by thinking about experience that I construct the experiencer?) is productive, precisely because there is no final answer but only a return to the question; the point is that I return a little changed, ready to ask the question again, in a different tone, perhaps, or with a different emphasis; and sometimes in the process I arrive at a place of silence or not-knowing from which art can spring. In my view, art is about performing answers to questions for which a solution is not currently possible. Which does not mean that my work is weird, or laden with philosophy. On the contrary, my responses to “weird thinking” are as mundane as eating or talking or pissing or fucking. But having asked those weird questions, the look and feel—the quality—of those actions change. Learning how to think in different ways is, in my experience, the only way that different ways of writing become possible.

I am currently working on the second part of the trilogy: a novel about a London theatre family in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Is it historical? Absolutely! Just as Flaubert used the same method to build both his Carthaginian palace and his village of Yonville (according to Yourcenar), I am using the same method to build my mid-twentieth-century theater as I did to build my Victorian house. Although the style of the second book is very different (it is in the third person, it ranges over time, it has a larger cast of characters, etc.), my task in writing it is the same: to set the limits for what my characters are capable of doing and thinking within certain spaces. Would a certain action be “thinkable” for a character in a certain location? Or more precisely, would a certain action of thought be “thinkable” there? Which is a question of space, and also therefore of history. I learn about the action of my characters’ thoughts from the form, function, cultural meaning, and historical significance of the objects in their environment, including their own bodies. For me, they are not just a product of their environment; they are their environment. There is no “room” and then “character’s experience of room”; rather these two things are by necessity integrated.

How about you? Are you sculpting anything new?

Danielle Dutton: I love that you had a conversation about Engels’s penis. Come to think of it, there is actually a penis in Margaret the First and I have been asked about it—but the penis in my book is silver.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to your next book of three. In a class I’m teaching right now—on place in fiction—we just had a lively conversation that was very similar to what you’re saying here about the relationship between your characters and their environment, how a story comes out of bodies acting meaningfully in certain spaces at certain times. We were reading Octavia Butler and Sofia Samatar that day, but all this would be so interesting to talk about too in terms of Renee Gladman’s writing. Do you know her work? I’m not sure it’s readily available in the UK. (UK publishers take note!) Renee is terrific, and, full disclosure, I publish three of her books at Dorothy, a publishing project; those novels—Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge—are about an invented city-state called Ravicka where language is gestural and the city is in crisis: growths on the streets, houses wandering off, people vanishing, etc. In the first, Event Factory, a linguist-traveler arrives in Ravicka and has to figure out how to use her body to navigate a shifting city and language. The book does what we’re talking about here but in a really tangible and wonderfully bizarre way.

As for me: Yes, I’ve started something new, but it’s nascent. I’m tempted to say it’s not historical but you and Yourcenar have me thinking now that every novel is historical. Mostly, it’s just new, and I’m not sure I know what it’s doing yet. It’s partly set in Bhutan, where I’ve never been—but then I’d never been to the seventeenth century either.

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