The 20 th Century Historical Novel

As many a literary critic emphasizes, the historical novel rose to another heyday in the century after Scott. However, it was only in the 1960s that the historical novel experienced indeed an evident renaissance.¹⁰ Of course, it has as such never been really outdated and there had always been novels using a historical background or setting or even historical personages to tell a story, but the experimental writers, the literary avant-garde, of the early 20^th century generally neglected historical material and were rather intent on making a rupture with the past. In a climate like this the literary adaptation of historical material was therefore certainly not supported. Ezra Pound has expressed this modernist differentiation from the past in his demand to “make it new”.

10 Ansgar Nünning as well as Heike Hartung indicate that a renaissance of the historical novel had already begun in the late 1960s and reached a highpoint in the 1980s. With the beginning of the 21^st century, the historical novel has well established its place in literature. History is as popular as ever, if not even more so.

Nevertheless, this dictum can also be applied to the historical novel which as a genre was indeed renewed. Reshaped and reborn with many a change in form and content it appeared again in the 20^th century. But novels like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography¹¹ (1928) or Between the Acts (posthumously published in 1941) were indeed so innovative

“that it took some time before these works were consciously read as historical novels, that is, before they were placed in a relation of continuity and innovation with preceding literary adaptations of historical materials” (Wesseling, 74).

As the historical novel underwent several changes and adaptations to the new century the discussion on the differences as well as similarities between historiography and historical fiction went on. In fact, the old topic of fact vs. fiction which has occupied many a writer and historian for ages figured prominently in modernist historical writing as well.

Historical novels of the 20^th century indeed foreground the problematic nature of the conventional distinction between history and fiction and the question if history is nothing but a fiction has been asked frequently. Yet, it is still not possible to give an unanimous answer to this question. Hence, these issues are now more or less openly discussed in the novels themselves and are no longer to be restricted to theoretical or philosophical writing.

By “[i]ncorporating reflections upon the retrospective recovery of the past into the very structure of the novel itself”, Elizabeth Wesseling stresses, “modernist writers changed the traditional position of the novelist vis-à-vis historiography from a complementary into a metahistorical one” (Wesseling, 93). In the years to come, this development of the metahistorical novel as well as the problematic fact-fiction-dichotomy became indeed a central concern of the postmodern historical novel as well. The eventual introduction and establishing of historiographic metafiction, which “refutes the natural or common-sense methods of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction” and “refuses the view that only history has a truth claim” (Hutcheon 1988, 93) is yet another indication that historiography and literature cannot be clearly separated anymore but rather intertwine in the 20^th century historical novel.

11 Having several themes in common, Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography can already be considered a predecessor to the late 20^th century female historical novels I am going to examine. In Orlando, Virginia Woolf considers such topics as the quest for identity in a world where specific gender expectations and stereotypical gender roles regulate and fix a woman’s live. This partly highly biographical work (it can indeed be considered a literary portrait of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West) furthermore displays the struggle of a woman for (artistic) creativity and independence, a subject still on the minds of today’s authoresses.

The historical novel’s unique combination of history and fiction points to its generic indeterminacy. That the historical novel is really a hybrid genre is already expressed in the term ‘historiographic metafiction’ itself, which was coined by Linda Hutcheon in her influential Poetics of Postmodernism. The term seems to be a contradiction at first, combining the factual and real with the imaginary, thus history with fiction. It also expresses a combination of the rather realist mode of writing to be found in historiography with the self-reflexivity of postmodern metafiction.

There is, of course, still the traditional form of historical fiction which follows Scott’s model but there also emerged exciting new and innovative types. These new historical novels, often regarded as postmodern, distinguish themselves from the Scottesque ideal by displaying a certain tendency towards the crossing of borders concerning narrative techniques, literary forms etc. Ansgar Nünning has made a great effort trying to explain, or rather to identify, the innovative “Grenzüberschreitungen” postmodern historical novels can display. In one of his influential essays he states:

Bei einem hybriden Genre wie dem historischen Roman, der Themen der Geschichte mit Mitteln der Fiktion darstellt, liegen Grenzüberschreitungen gewissermaßen in der Natur der Gattung. Dennoch unterscheidet sich der zeitgenössische historische Roman in England von jenem traditionellen Gattungsmodell, das durch die Werke Sir Walter Scotts geprägt wurde, durch die Vielfalt der Entgrenzungstendenzen, mit denen er etablierte Trennungslinien zur Disposition stellt und Gegensätze zu neuen Synthesen verknüpft. In den für innovative historische Romane typischen Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Fakten und Fiktionen, Historie und Legende, kollektiver und individueller Geschichte kommt eine revisionistische Geschichtsauffassung zum Ausdruck, die den Akzent vom Öffentlichen auf das Private verlagert, die der Wahrnehmung des historischen Geschehens im Bewusstsein durchschnittlicher Menschen Bedeutung beimisst und die Grundannahmen positivistischer Historiographie in Zweifel zieht. (Nünning 1993, 54)

These content-oriented extensions are furthermore accompanied by formal innovations. By the end of the 1960s it became for instance more and more fashionable to replace the rather restrictive mode of realistic narration in historical novels by a more experimental (postmodern) approach and add to the genre the multiplicity of postmodernism with its interest in fracturing and fragmentation, indeterminacy and plurality. The postmodern historical novel hence began to raise “questions about the very status of reality and the world” (Malpas, 24). Whereas a seminal idea of modernist thought stresses the “notion of

historical development and progress towards more rational and just forms of social organisation and cultural interaction” (Malpas, 80), postmodern critics and writers question and challenge this linear historical progress and come to the conclusion that history has indeed rather come to an end. Linda Hutcheon further enlightens this thought by stating that “the postmodern is not ahistorical or dehistoricized, though it does question our (perhaps unacknowledged) assumptions about what constitutes historical knowledge”

(Hutcheon 1988, xii). And Simon Malpas adds that “what has ended is not the production of [historical] events themselves, but rather our need or ability to form a narrative from them that demonstrates their coherent, developmental logic and points to a utopian future in which the conflicts and contradictions between them will have been resolved” (Malpas, 89/90). History is no longer a grand coherent story but instead “splits into multiple versions and narrative types that are generated by the needs and desires of particular communities whose conflicting ideals can never be reconciled in a universal system” (ibid., 98). A new emphasis is hence put on the way history can be told. When postmodern writers of history began to break the grand narrative into fragments they thus finally allowed formerly silenced voices to be heard and question their exclusion from the traditional accounts of the past.

As the novelists further added this new self-reflexivity to the postmodern historical novels, it eventually developed into what is now known as historiographic metafiction. With this expression Hutcheon describes “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon 1988, 5). Those texts labelled historiographic metafiction do not put an emphasis on the representation of historical events and personages but rather on the reflection of historiographic problems. Simply put, they are writings about the writing of history, and Nünning adds: “Solche Romane setzen sich mit Problemen der narrativen Repräsentation vergangener Wirklichkeit auseinander und werfen Fragen nach den Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschieden zwischen Geschichtsschreibung und Fiktion auf”

(Nünning 1999, 31). Again, the historical novelist is faced with the question of how to separate fact and fiction in historical writing. But in contrast to their predecessors the postmodern writers of historical fiction openly address this problem and even turn it into a central topic of their novels. They toy around with fact and fiction, with history and myth, and thus draw attention to the problematic writing of history.

However, postmodern historical fiction does indeed not restrict itself to the writing of historiographic metafiction. Although Linda Hutcheon seems to have applied this term to all postmodern and especially historical fiction, there are several other subspecies of the historical novel that have to be named. “This near obsession with history in contemporary fiction has led to a number of critical attempts to categorize and redefine the genre of the historical novel “(Gauthier, 8) and Ansgar Nünning, above all,¹² “argues that different types of historical fiction can and should be distinguished and tries to throw a new light on the various functions that postmodernist historical fiction can fulfil” (Nünning 1999, 15). He subdivides historical fiction into five groups: the documentary historical novel, the realist historical novel, the revisionist historical novel, the metahistorical novel, and last but not least, historiographic metafiction. Whereas a documentary historical novel generally focuses on verifiable historical events or personages and rather exhibits a tendency to veil its fictionality, a realist historical novel uses history only as a setting for the fictional plot that is at its centre. Revisionist historical novels are mainly critical examinations of the past and its effects on the present while they also display innovative and often experimental narrative techniques. Brian McHale explains why the postmodern historical novel is revisionist: “First, it revises the content of the historical record, reinterpreting the historical record, often demystifying or debunking the orthodox version of the past. Secondly, it revises, indeed transforms, the conventions and norms of historical fiction itself” (McHale, 90). The metahistorical novel then is very self-reflexive and relates to “a series of events that have taken place in the past, but focuses on the ways in which these events are grasped and explained in retrospect” (Wesseling, 90). In that sense it resembles historiographic metafiction, though this subgenre is furthermore engaged in problems concerning the writing of history itself: in historiographic metafiction history steps back behind historiography. Nünning clarifies: “Im Unterschied zum traditionellen Roman liegt der Akzent in historiographischer Metafiktion somit nicht auf der Darstellung geschichtlicher Personen oder Ereignisse. Vielmehr stehen die Bezugnahme auf geschichtliche Themen und die

12 Linda Hutcheon, Elizabeth Wesseling, Brian McHale, and David Cowart have already successfully subdivided the whole genre of historical literature before Ansgar Nünning undertook this task. However, it seems to me that Nünning, by considering, evaluating, and further developing the ideas of his predecessors, has done the best job giving a categorization of the postmodern historical novel. I have therefore concentrated on his subgroups of the historical novel. It has nevertheless to be noted that his typology is, when it comes to the actual interpretation of chosen contemporary novels, too inflexible. Several novels simply deny a definite classification. This resistance of the, as Heike Hartung calls them, “polytypisch geprägte Romane” (Hartung, 12) only proves the hybridity of a genre such as the postmodern historical novel.

metafiktionale Qualität von historiographic metafiction primär im Dienst der theoretischen Reflexion über Probleme der Geschichtsschreibung“ (Nünning 1999, 30).¹³

This classification of the contemporary historical novel shows that it has gone through many formal changes as well as through an extension of its contents. New choices of subject have been added, one of them being the as yet untold history of the so-called Other.

13 I have only given a short sketch of these five subgenres of contemporary historical fiction since I intend to discuss a few of them in more detail in my analyses of selected contemporary historical novels. For further information consider Ansgar Nünning’s essay “Beyond the Great Story: Der Postmoderne Historische Roman als Medium Revisionistischer Geschichtsdarstellung, Kultureller Erinnerung und Metahistoriographischer Reflexion” (1999) and especially his two volumes of Von historischer Fiktion zu Historiographischer Metafiktion (1995).