How to Write a Historical Novel and (MAYBE) not be in it....

Two parts

Part 1: Whose story?

One of the more popular YouTube clips that gets watched in many American classrooms where diversity is discussed is a talk by Nigerian-American novelist Chimamanda Adichie, called “The Danger of a Single Story.”

I’m prefacing what I’d like to say today about writing a novel, including a historical novel, with Adichie’s maxim—write not a single story, but many—for a reason. That reason is that her manifesto exactly fits the generally multi-stranded plot, and multi-actor action, of most historical novels I’ve read. What Adichie says therefore, is not only relevant for fiction that expresses radical cultural alterity on a mostly geographic and syncretic  axis, but also applicable to fiction that wants to express the radical alterity of history, the essentially unfamiliar interiority of the past, only on a temporal and diachronic axis.

my story, my family’s story, Archaeology of the self

1. but also not….

Part 2: Beginnings, Endings, and the Flabby Middle; or, Time and Pacing in Historical Fiction

There is still some kind conceit in historical novel-writing, and maybe in writing history, that one must somehow begin at someplace called the beginning. But the beginning is a shifty, slippery kind of place, and I came to know this when I had to ‘start’ and officially declare the ‘beginning’ of my story in Love’s Garden. And in order to choose a beginning, of course, what in a sense instantly struck me in those first months and years of writing was that though I didn’t know yet what the ending should be—indeed, the early drafts of this novel never ended wisely, elegantly, or at all, for which reason they are now in the dustheaps of history—I knew that the ending should be something from which a beginning can be imagined, returned to, even. So, if the map of the journey from beginning to ending didn’t yet exist, the beginning didn’t need to presuppose an ending. And since I was writing historical fiction, not history, I realized with a start and a groan, what a plethora of choices and freedoms I had, therefore, as to where to start, since I didn’t yet have to know exactly how it would all  end.

What all this means is that, of course, in a truly ‘original’ manner, I began with a woman on a train being pursued by or pursuing something. Yes, there is an element of mystery in my novel, though I don’t think this is crucial for historical fiction, history being in itself such a mystery for us mere mortals. However, having once put the character I’d call my ur-heroine, though not the actual heroine, on the train, I still had to determine the pace of the narrative, the exposition, especially as befitted the particular genre, namely the historical novel. I mean, if it were speculative or science fiction/fantasy, the concept of time and duration could easily be simply abandoned. But not so for the plodding historical novelist, and so I decided that the pace would be, perhaps, even grindingly (note the train engine imagery of course, especially for a British locomotive in nineteenth-century India), slow or at least ornately, lusciously detailed. So, it is indeed, very slowly, that my expository introduction to the story takes place, until we are unceremoniously whisked off the train along with our ur-heroine and taken to her actual destination, the scene of her redemption and her torment.

What all this means is that, of course, in a truly ‘original’ manner, I began with a woman on a train being pursued by or pursuing something. Yes, there is an element of mystery in my novel, though I don’t think this is crucial for historical fiction, history being in itself such a mystery for us mere mortals. However, having once put the character I’d call my ur-heroine, though not the actual heroine, on the train, I still had to determine the pace of the narrative, the exposition, especially as befitted the particular genre, namely the historical novel. I mean, if it were speculative or science fiction/fantasy, the concept of time and duration could easily be simply abandoned. But not so for the plodding historical novelist, and so I decided that the pace would be, perhaps, even grindingly (note the train engine imagery of course, especially for a British locomotive in nineteenth-century India), slow or at least ornately, lusciously detailed. So, it is indeed, very slowly, that my expository introduction to the story takes place, until we are unceremoniously whisked off the train along with our ur-heroine and taken to her actual destination, the scene of her redemption and her torment.

But, in a sense this pacing of the opening scenes, and maybe even its occurrence in a train, is indebted in some ways to the detective novel, the classic twentieth-century one at least, where you don’t begin with the crime or even its scene or even its announcement, but with a staidly dignified bourgeois scene in which Hercules Poirot patiently sips his tisane and exchanges pelasnatries with his associate Hastings and his secretary cum mystery woman Miss Lemon—notice the juxtapositions? Tisane? Lemon?— when either a letter, or a newspaper article, or a telephone call brings ‘to him a case,’ as Mr. Poirot himself would say. Anyhow, I deemed it wise to begin that way, with a somewhat drawn-out expository scene that only signaled a crisis but didn’t declare it.

Imagine, therefore, the discontent of some of my readers when my third chapter then began with the sentence, “Fifteen years passed.” One of my reviewers had a huge beef, if I may say, with this and made her feelings amply clear by wondering at my audacity in thus treating time in a most cavalier way.  Quote her here.

I empathize with my reviewer. However, I do not agree with her. Here’s why. In historical novels, the pace must vary. Or else, either everyone is dead and gone, or the reader is snoring. Therefore, in chapter three—where after spending the first two chapters somewhat lazily laying out the Murder on the Orient Express kind of mojo of the story and taking the reader to the village where our perp, the ur-heroine hides—I decided to make what you could call an  early cinema move (where the pages of the simulated book on screen flutter and take you years later to the chapter, date and event that actually counts). I took the reader, without ceremony or apology, to the next important event in the story, the fate and history of the ur-heroine’s daughter, the real heroine. In life, the months, days and hours may be countable, even recordable; in fiction we have at our service the option of deploying either a chronic or acute movement of time, which I will gloss further in a moment.

My telescoping fifteen years into one sentence would be unforgivable in history writing. But nothing is more common, useful and even fun in historical fiction and film. Time, in fiction, is in a sense, as long as it takes, as Joan Silber tells us, but it is also, in another joyous, mirrored movement, as short as it takes. The novelist and writer has little obligation to bumble and drone through a horological prison sentence. They have the freedom, instead, to make the important events, the life-changing, world-shattering ones, happen in what might be called acute movements, interspersed with lyric prose if need be, and to dispose of the hours till the critical acute scene as what might be called chronic time. In some cases chronic time has been summarized as “Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy goes away, boy comes back and finds girl still there, they cry, they marry, and live happily ever after.” You are less likely to go gaga over the chapter where girl is grating lemons for lemon peel for that tart according to the cookbook instructions, than to cheer on the boy in the chapter where he, a marine, jumps off the ship to find girl strolling hand in hand with a soon to be displaced beau and proceeds to swagger his way back into her life. So, take that, reviewer…learn to understand the different uses of chronic and acute movements of time.

Part 3: Finally, is there an author in this story?

I should begin this conversation by warning you that the unthinkable has happened. A very famous contemporary guru of creative writing called James Wood is on official record in his essay in The Guardian, 2020, as saying that “historical novels are nowadays almost always either failures or of no artistic merit.” He even recruits in this sinister verdict the influential writer of whom some of you may have heard—a certain Henry James—who wrote to one of his friends in 1900 that ‘the historical novel was doomed precisely because the reconstruction of past consciousness could never be achieved by the novelist, and that the form always had, therefore, a ‘fatal cheapness’” (Wood 2020). In angling to write a historical novel, I might have taken this badly, since I have attempted the reconstruction of past consciousness. I don’t, however, because Wood himself offers us a way out of which I have been acutely conscious throughout my writing process. Quite contrarily, in the same essay Wood proceeds to salvage the historical novel by saying that the historical novel is still one of “the major forms of the novel at its greatest” and we not only can, but we must, save it. And how should we do this, you ask? Wood says, by focusing on the development of characters with profound and worthwhile interiority or self-consciousness. And agreeing with him on this, I understand the development of characters with such profound articulated or implied interiority profits from, or actually even necessitates, the author inhabiting with the characters to greater or lesser degrees, certain qualities of self and consciousness worth having and keeping.

However, modern novelists, as Wood sees it, are facing an especially formidable challenge in this project. This is, according to him, the challenge that in a sense our modern consciousness is ‘cheapened,’ gutted, and sort of not worth having, as a result of what he calls the tremendous and unsustainable acceleration in the pace of cultural change in the last fifty years: namely, our postmodern, electronic, information and socially mediated times. As a result , he thinks, we have lost our ability to connect not only with the past, but with the very concept of a durable, meaningful ‘self.’ (I know this sounds old-fashioned, but….) In other words, if you are, unfortunately, a historical novelist, beware at the start that neither you nor your reader is likely to have access to the past, or to its, other, consciousness. Wood is very pessimistic. He says, “we abound in novels about ephemera and trash….and part of that trash is not simply the new furniture of modern life, but the very quality of our consciousness” (Wood 2020). In other words, as cultural subjects, Wood says, we are endangered species.

If it weren’t clear enough by now that Wood is no ardent postmodernist, he seems to drive the final nail into the coffin of historical fiction by asking this sardonic rhetorical question: “We have more trash in our minds…than humans did a century ago. More pertinently, thanks to video and television and the net, we see ourselves constantly represented and replicated. So we are more self-conscious than at any other time in history; on the other hand, the low quality of most of this self-consciousness threatens to drown the self…. We have a very educated and theoretically refined sense of ourselves; but what self do we have?”

But, having thus thrust the final poniard into the guts of us lowly life forms—with very little consciousness or interiority when it comes even to our own selves, and consequentially what  awareness, indeed, of historical interiorities and consciousnesses—Wood then stretches out a helping hand to us even as we drown in our gory ignominy. He writes, “This will be the task of the next generation of novelists: to connect the inner life of our culture with the inner life of the human… while not hiding from the reader that this connection has become problematic…and the novel, of all forms, offers the greatest chance of providing this fulfillment.”

Whew, we say, there is a chance at redemption then, after all. All we have to do as writers of fiction, and especially historical fiction, is to make sure we pay attention to interiority and consciousness as prime ingredients of good fiction, our own and our characters’, and then, maybe, just maybe, the novel form and society will survive.

I hope you have realized by now that thus far I have been making very gentle but extremely respectful fun of James Wood, whose advice I find spot on and whose apocalyptic tone I take with a quarry of salt as the rhetoric of someone who loves literature very, very much. Without further ado then, I want to talk about exactly what Wood says we must salvage: the importance of using our craft to write fiction centered on characters, with profound interiority, in action. And my focus today is on the ways in which authors of historical fiction, or fictional history, are inevitably implicated or enmeshed in their characters with more or less intense kinds of what James Wood calls consciousness or interiority. So here goes.

Sometimes writers say, somewhat flippantly, that all the characters in their fiction are themselves, different avatars, different bucket lists, different fantasies, different past or future lives. Without going that far, I’d like to confess that I am also guilty of being ‘in my own novel’ Love’s Garden to different extents in different parts of it. There are, I’d say three ‘intensities’ of authorial consciousness lurking side by side with fictional character and action. Let me begin sharing my thoughts on the first kind of consciousness or interiority, which I will call ‘universal-focused,’ this by reading from a passage in Love’s Garden.

Passage 1 is what I call ‘universal-focused.’

Passage 1: LG 32-33

As you can probably see, in the first passage, what prevails are what you might call ‘universals.’ By universals I mean experiences and consciousness, externalized or not, implied or articulated, that we might loosely ascribe to most or very large parts of humanity: we love other people and ourselves, we are incensed by injustice, we do not like to be lied to, we do not wish to be harmed by the cruelty or selfishness of others. Thus, this first passage, where I, the author, feel very much a part of the cast of character(s), narrates experiences, emotions, and consciousness that most people might have gone through, can identify with, relate to, regardless of whether they have shared the particularities of character and consciousness narrated. The writer of historical fiction, in my view, can very comfortably and without feeling too guilty often ‘inhabit’ such passages, because it is almost a communal space. In such passages, the author and the reader, one might say, are in the thick of things with the characters. Something of my own past, memories, emotions has quite likely seeped into and softened the contours of the prose here. I am, here, a participant-observer, to borrow a term from anthropology, and perhaps a bit more participant than observer. These are also passages of what I might call ‘lyric’ movements of time, where the personal infuses the public or political record and experience. Their emotional outcome is intense personal engagement, a shared consciousness.

Passage 2 is what I’ll call ‘particularized.’

Passage 2: LG: 85-86

This second passage, I’d say, is one where universals step back to give way to ‘particulars,’ experiences and interiority that are specific to certain groups of individuals or even a single person, which a universal, general readership is unlikely to be able to access without considerable nudging and leading, maybe, by the writer. Here, the story relates an event, a setting, or characters in action that is plausible, faintly recognizable, could happen to or be us, but is likelier seen as a ‘particular’ and novel ‘imaginary’ experience, outside the direct ken of the reader. In some sense, this is the kind of effect of fiction that Aristotle called ‘cathartic’—a sort of “Poor things, there but for the grace of God….” However, here the brushstrokes of the author’s interiority and emotions are still prominent, even though suffused with the contours and shapes of public events and public histories, an ‘other’ consciosuness. Though only some individuals in the right place at the right time could inhabit these events and histories, the author is likelier to be on first name bases with the fictional characters living through them. The reader looks on and looks in but is not quite one of the cast. Still, in a sense, these passages of historical fiction powerfully expand the reader’s imagination, stretch their beliefs and empathy, tantalize their curiosity, and create emotional engagement with another interiority almost as intense as the first kind of ‘universalizing’ passage.

As the author, I inhabit these passages more than the reader does, but I am also somewhat sidelined, only sharing rooms here with characters who are particularized in ways that give such passages a productively alien quality, an alterity that is still human, recognizable, but not necessarily universal. As author, I have the advantage over the reader here, quite simply, but I also have the responsibility of using this advantage for the reader’s benefit, to give them emotional frisson and catharsis through such ‘intersubjective’ movements of time where the main subjects are me and my characters.

And finally, we have passage 3, which I would call ‘historical.’

Passage 3: LG: 187-88 In passage 3, neither author nor reader—nor, most probably, anyone they know or could know—can inhabit the narrative or the interiority of the character(s). It is a purely recorded narrative of historical events, as abstract and impersonal as possible, and though as sensitive and empathic humans we certainly latch on to the significance of these events, such narrative is in the end the fruits of the work of the researcher, the scholar, the historian, even. The author, here is, one such. They have had to perform the labor of historical research themselves to find facts in the annals, and incorporate them into the chronological axis of their fictional narrative. Such passages of historical fiction are, more than the previous two kinds, fairly depersonalized. Here are events happening that are documented, recorded, attested to, even witnessed by others, but those witnesses are not the author, or the reader, or the present community. Those witnesses are the historical annals and archives, a matter of public memory and record, what I call ‘chronic public’ time. Here, the radical alterity of history somewhat off-stages other interiorities and subjectivities, but even this alterity is still human, still publicly shared, and though the reader’s engagement with such text is perhaps less visceral, and the text still guides us cathartically into the heart of explanations for many human mysteries and miseries.

To sum up, then, when writing historical fiction, but also other kinds of fiction, the author must remain aware what different kind of opportunities they have for inhabiting the narrative and the consciousness of characters, and what the returns are for the author being less and more grafted within the narrative. The three different kinds of passages with possibilities of interiority I explicated above from Love’s Garden—lyric, intersubjective, and chronic public, or ‘universal,’ ‘particularized’ and ‘historical’—require different kinds of tone, pacing, diction and in the end, emplacement, of the author. To be able to know and handle those different modalities of tone, diction, pacing and emplacement, to write historical fiction with different intensities and postures of engagement, empowers the writer of historical fiction to keep the reader engaged in a dramatic monologue with themselves and humanity as a whole. So, go ahead and appear as a character in your own historical fiction to your heart’s content, and calibrate your appearance in your novel according to what effects of universality, particularity, or historicity you want to achieve, always remembering that your reader’s varied engagement, dramatic absorption, and subjective catharsis, through their ‘preoccupation’ with your richly yet stochastically, piercingly yet unpredictably conscious characters in action, is your ultimate and possibly only goal.