Comments on: The historical fiction rant: The GG edition

By: Nic Boshart

Nic Boshart — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:47:09 +0000

Cadence Weapon for Giller Judge! Problem solved.

By: B. Glen Rotchin

B. Glen Rotchin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:47:19 +0000

By ‘improv’ I mean being in the moment, not working off of a script, thinking (writing) on your feet, spontaneous, guessing, and most of all being utterly and completely honest. I think the historical novelists have material to lean on, and too often that support becomes a crutch. I thin that’s what Peter is referring to when he mentions ‘gooling-to-death’. But here a challenge, can you think of an historical novel that changed the way we read, re-defined our language, say, the way Joyce’s Ullyses did, or Kafka’s Trial, or Nabokov’s Lolita, or On the Road did? All novels seeking a new language to describe their time and place. And now that I’ve mentioned them, is it something particular about being Canadian that enamours us to historical fiction? US and European writers seem to be more interested in capturing the ‘moment’, the zeitgeist. And can it be because as a country, we are politically, economically and culturally passengers on the global bus and not even near the front?

By: Andrew S

Andrew S — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:42:36 +0000

Maybe just my bias showing then, August. I was thinking of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and so on — they seem to have passed their best before date without curdling. I think it’s still a bit too early to decide if the writers you cite have produced “great” books, because that judgment is up to, um, history.

By: August

August — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:01:30 +0000

Oh, there’s tonnes more recent examples (most of Pynchon, for example, as well as Cormac McCarthy, AS Byatt–though not her best works, imho–Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, Julian Barnes… I could go on), I made a conscious decision to avoid more recent works, especially those by living authors, as the idea of what is or is not a ‘great’ book would be more hotly contested.

By: peter behrens

peter behrens — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:45:06 +0000

There are all kinds of ways to engage with the present and one of them is to look at the past. I would argue there’s a profound bias in the culture at large against the whole idea of ‘history’ being in any way relevant to the now. It’s so, well, twentieth century. Corporations have no interest in history even (especially) their own. But the present is a many-layered thing and most of those layers are history. No better subject for stories, it seems to me. And it’s not checking out of the ‘now’ but engaging with it. Corporations and the consumerist culture want to pretend there is no past so everyone can get on with trending and spending. But there is; the past is there, can’t escape it. It’s fun to try and puzzle it in a shape and that, of course, is political: the picking and choosing to make history. I agree with the commentator who criticized the kind of historical fiction (yikes maybe she happened to read my novel and was thinking of it, but i hope not) over-researched and just googled to death where the writer wants to lay every arcane detail down for breathless admiration. That is tiresome. But that kind f writing always is and there’s a lot of cotemporary fiction written like that. I always hate movies hen they do period and someone sticks an amber, fuzzy, filter (the nostalgia filter maybe) over the lens so we see the honeyed light of the past. I have a feeling the light of the past in its varieties wasn’t any different than the light of the present.

By: B. Glen Rotchin

B. Glen Rotchin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:18:25 +0000

I don’t think the ascendency of historical fiction implies anything about the value of the here and now as subject matter. But it does say a lot more: About the ‘professionalization’ of creative writing, the displacement of experience by research, which is at the heart of academic training etc. About how conservative readers have become, and by extension publishers (who always look for safe/cost-effective bets.) The ‘perils’ of getting the present wrong, suggests a kind of cowardice on the part of our novelists. I would go a step further. There is a difference between re-telling a story already told, one that has been amply sifted through the filter of time and perspective, and creating one on the fly. It’s the difference between following a script (allowing room for a certain amount of interpretation) and all out, no holds barred improv.

By: Andrew S

Andrew S — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:00:05 +0000

That’s the sort of list I was coming up with. Perhaps this is just my bias speaking, but historical fiction seems (in my brief mental survey) to have faded in significance, presumable as literary fashion has changed. I’m sure there are more recent examples that I’m just forgetting, but if you think of great books in this century (actually, the last century; I’m 10 yrs out of date here), they tended to have contemporary settings.

That’s not a claim that historical fiction can’t be significant; it’s just a counter to the idea that by engaging with your times you stand to produce work that doesn’t survive its best before date.

To Mary’s point: when does fiction become historical? Is it historical when it’s set in living memory? I don’t think this corresponds with the normal usage of “historical fiction.”

By: Finn Harvor

Finn Harvor — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:50:39 +0000

” the long gestation process (and by this I mean not only the writing but finding a publisher etc.)”

But this is precisely it. The selection process has seized up.

It’s a crisis, basically. Good work is not being published, and in a culture whose more influential institutions all too often have a default setting of preferring a dullness-tinged, gaseous humourlessness that is, as A. Michaels once described it, focussed on Canada’s grand themes of geography and — oh, damn! I keep forgetting the second! — it’s hardly surprising there is so much despair among writers.

Fuck that with vigour, you recently said, Steven. Well — where’s the fucking movement for change in Anglo Canada? Where’s the fucking anger that will translate itself into creating an alternative literature? Asking the literary establishment to change its stripes is, it should be clear by now, a lost cause. This is an establishment that has allowed itself to become so rotten, so numb, that in a general sense it can’t even distinguish good from bad anymore. It’s just looking for pseudo-highbrow product.

p.s. Glad you’ve got rid of your terror-inducing spam filter, btw, Steven. Now — how about dispensing with comments moderation? It slows the discussion down and gives it a many-divergent-conversations-at-once feel.

By: August

August — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:42:12 +0000

Steven, I agree more or less completely. I do wish that, if we must keep this obsession with historical fiction, we could at least raise a Patrick O’Brian from within our ranks.

Andrew: Sticking strictly to fiction, and avoiding obvious things like Elizabethan drama, we find that the following ‘great books’ were historical fiction when they were written – Adam Bede (well, sort of), Silas Marner, A Tale of Two Cities, The Waverly Novels, Barnaby Rudge, The Three Musketeers (and sequels), Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, War and Peace, just about everything by RL Stevenson, and possibly Moby Dick, though I can’t be entirely certain.

By: Mary Soderstrom

Mary Soderstrom — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:34:37 +0000

Two points:
The first: some historical fiction is stylistically innovative and light years away from bland escapism into the past.
Mary Novik’s Conceit is an example, while Glover’s Elle is hardly conventional.

The second is that when writing fiction, even when one starts out writing about contemporary times, the long gestation process (and by this I mean not only the writing but finding a publisher etc.) may mean that when the novel comes out, its “now” has become the “recent past.” An example close to home: in 1997 I started writing The Violets of Usambara, which takes place mostly in that year. It wasn’t published until 2008, however, when some of the events–ethnic conflict in Burundi and Rwanda–had begun to recede into the past. But getting the story written sometimes requires a lot of reflection that can’t be rushed.