Historical fiction

During the Unexpected Business Trip, I had some time to mull over this comment from Dan Green:

I've never been sure what the purpose of historical fiction is supposed to be. Merely to re-create the past? Why? [. . .]

Some historical novels try to burrow beneath the received wisdom about history, or to illuminate some of its blurrier quarters, and while this is a praiseworthy endeavor, it's still hard to see how such an effort ought to be considered "literary" rather than a useful adjunct to history-writing. If the idea is still to re-create the past so we might consider it as the past, I'm still not clear how such work really advances the cause of fiction-writing.

Other ostensibly historical fiction, such as Robert Coover's The Public Burning or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, aren't really concerned with reproducing history but rather with interrogating it, forcing it to testify, as it were, to the veracity of accepted representations of it, to the hidden truths behind these representations that have been hidden so well their revelation seems as surprising as any unexpected plot twist in a skillfully told tale. For these writers, "history" becomes just more material for the novelist's imagination to transform, at times simply offering itself up as the inspiration to the novelist's own powers of invention. [. . .] Such writers approach history not as the ersatz historian hoping to recount the past but as literary artists for whom the past can be turned to use for present purposes. Is this the best approach for the novelist (or reader) interested in events from the past as subjects for fiction?

I'm not going to supply a definitive answer to these questions (as if I could!), since "best approach" is in the mind of the beholder (best approach for what?) and "purpose" isn't a term I usually use in relationship to fiction.  Still, Dan leads us down the yellow brick road to that annoying old question: does the historical novel produce knowledge about the past? Is it, that is, another mode of historiography? In The Historical Romance, Helen Cam dryly makes a point to the effect that the genre creates the illusion of knowledge about the past--a point that can be extended to far more serious exercises in the form.  (I'm surely not the only person who, after looking at the author's list of sources, has scratched her chin and said, "hmmmm.")  Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt recently showed me Candace Robb's "Author's Note" to The Apothecary Rose, in which Robb cheerfully admits that "the novelist used Paris guild rules in York, but the historian made sure they were historically accurate rules" (318), a qualification that would make any full-time historian faint into her index cards.  The novel is "true to history," just not the right history.  As some critics have pointed out, it's remarkably hard to separate Historical Fiction Classic from the alternative history.  The road to "now" may change--e.g., fictional characters do real deeds, chronology alters for narrative flow, and so forth--but "now" itself doesn't.  (There's been some discussion of this point in relationship to Scott's Redgauntlet.) 

Not, of course, that that answers the "why" question.  So let's ask a historical novelist:

I don't believe that anyone transcends the bounds of their time: I think that's too fanciful a concept.  And, no, I have never wondered what Clara's life would have been like in another time or place.  I don't know what purpose it would have served.  What mattered was imagining concrete realities and emotions, the limitations placed on freedom of thought or action by social circumstances, personal choice, upbringing, place, etc.  These things are surely timeless.  ("Questions for Janice Galloway," Clara: A Novel of Clara Schumann, #8.) 

The constraints of historical fiction operate much like the constraints of the sestina: the work of art emerges from the intersection of the author's creative powers and the genre's pre-existing conventions.  Galloway's Clara is a "traditional" historical novel of the biographical subvariety, written according to the demands of classical realism; as Galloway points out elsewhere in the interview, the novel foregrounds the emotional travails of both Schumanns and uses the historically-specific details as a backdrop.  We are not supposed to see the history, in other words--the details provide the backdrop for an ultimately thwarted romance. (It's possible for a historical novelist to go further and eliminate nearly all of the "reality effects," the better to dwell in the mind of the protagonist.  J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg would be a case in point.)  The "universal" in Clara Schumann's experience lies in its historicity, not in the possibility that it might transcend history. 

Historical novels in the realist mode tend to avoid metafiction, which is not quite the same thing as saying that they tend to avoid questions about how we know and represent what the past.  You could make a case, for example, that Gore Vidal's Lincoln is all about the problem of knowing Lincoln, a problem that Vidal cleverly exacerbates by keeping us almost entirely out of Lincoln's head.  When it comes to the novel's central point, Vidal's ability to manipulate POV trumps his ability to deploy historically accurate dialogue.  My old friend Emily Sarah Holt (I finished that article! Hooray!), for that matter, spent forty novels demonstrating that the English needed to deconstruct non-evangelical narratives of their island's history.  (Talk about your hermeneutics of suspicion.)  Postmodernist historical fiction, of the sort that Dan seems to be describing, may not be "about" historical events at all--David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, hardly a historical novel in any traditional sense, nevertheless spends a good deal of time reflecting on the mechanics of cultural transmission and the permutations of various belief systems.