My previous post about the problems of the historical novel has another dimension to it. In that post, I posed two questions, working with C.J. Sansom's popular Tudor detective novel, Dissolution: whether a good historical novel is harder to write in a period of poor general education, and whether the historical novel works less effectively when narrated in the first person. Both problems arise because the novel appears more didactic than fictional. Now whatever the answer to these questions, my point is that they were not raised out of my engagement with some great work of literature. Indeed, I suggested that the best historical literary fictions, such as John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, actively bring such questions to the fore through devices such as metafiction, by which they reflect on the processes by which the story is being crafted. So, in a sense, my two simple questions hardly seem worth asking about this book, because the novel has pre-empted them and is interested in deeper, more complex issues, such as the degree to which we can ever transparently and accurately represent anything through language. It is perhaps only in less carefully constructed literature that basic questions come to the fore, at least for literary critics, because the problems with the fiction stand out so clearly.

And this brings to mind something I said to my students at the start of the academic year. We were looking at Robinson Crusoe, and in my initial questions I ascertained that the majority of them had not enjoyed it. Some of them were even bold enough to call it a "bad" novel. Ever the optimist, I tried to put a positive spin on things by saying that this was a pretty unique work on their course. Most of the novels, poems and plays they study over the three years are there because they have some intrinsic aesthetic merit, at least according to the lecturers who include them on syllabi. Robinson Crusoe, however, is there by virtue of its historical significance, as one of the earliest English novels. And so it is a unique book for them to study, because it is one of those rare works that has some quite obvious deficiencies in style and structure, even if it is contextually an important work of literature. In the tutorial, we were able quite easily to discuss issues of realism, because of how sharply this is breached when Crusoe swims naked to the shipwreck and returns with biscuits in his pockets. We also pinpointed that one primary objection to the novel is that its allegorical and didactic religious intentions bubble like froth on the surface of the plot, and so we almost automatically put up barriers against its moralising. The development of the novel over the three centuries since Crusoe can be read as the development of increasingly clever ways to conceal social and political issues beneath the text, in ways which are more effective because they sneak in by the back door of the book's potential readings. As with Dissolution, this problem of didacticism in Robinson Crusoecame out because of, rather than in spite of, the developmental weaknesses of Defoe's embryonic novel.

I wonder, therefore, whether literature courses are perhaps too much built around the canon of good literature. Should courses be bolder and also look at works of questionable literary quality? This of course feeds into broader debates about the role of literature departments: should literature departments exist to maintain taste and inculcate generations of students about what a good work of art looks like (a Harold Bloom kind of view), or should departments reflect the literary predilictions of culture as a whole, studying those books that happen to be popular even if not considered good fiction by trained literary critics? My own opinions would sway towards the latter, since my research looks at popular science fiction (arguably the most academically overlooked genre of significance), including film and computer games. Over the years, I have drifted away from being a pure literature student into a cultural studies researcher.

But regardless of my personal convictions and this broader debate, I am sure that even the conservative, Bloomian school ought to acknowledge that the teaching of literature loses something if it only ever focuses on the good, without providing a counter-image of the "bad" against which fine writing defines itself. Not only would such an "anti-canon" (as one might tentatively call it) help to guide questions of taste, it also might point to significant theoretical issues, such as those to which my attention was drawn in my previous post. The risk of only ever looking at "good" literature is that we focus intently on the intricate stylistic complexities that combine to make it excellent. We talk about Austen's free indirect discourse as a way of creating psychological intimacy, or George Eliot's omniscient narrator in Middlemarch, or John Fowles' historiographic argument in The French Lieutenant's Woman. And we overlook the very basic fact that a novel (and in a different way, a poem) tells a story, and that novels that have few stylistic innovations or have significant stylistic problems can nevertheless tell "good" stories. Just look at the longevity of the Crusoe myth in popular culture, or the fact that, in spite of my critical objections, I am absorbed in Dissolution's murder mystery, turning the pages as my light burns late into the night.

Labels: C.J. Sansom, canon, didacticism, Dissolution, Literature, teaching

Because I am now freed from the shackles of reading for research, I have just started an historical thriller that has been receiving rave reviews: C.J. Sansom's Dissolution. However, because the disease of literary criticism has by now infected me deep into my bones, I cannot approach this novel in the light-hearted, entertaining way I am supposed to, and cannot help but think about questions of technique.

Dissolution has sparked off a few thoughts about the problems of historical novels in particular, and also of first person narration in general.

Issues in the former begin on the first page, and can be summarised by a single word: didacticism. This novel is set in the Tudor period, in the wake of the Henretian Reformation. But lest we miss the connection, within the first few paragraphs we are informed that our hero is working for Lord Cromwell; that he had "once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men"; that he spots poles on London Bridge upon which stand the heads of those executed for treason; and that he is mourning the death of Queen Jane (Seymour). The historical details are packed in here, but the effect is like touring a museum recreation of a Tudor scene.

There is nothing natural in either the novel or such a museum, as every person has been placed there not for their own purposes, but to illustrate with waxy rigidity some dimension of the period. The blacksmith never simply happens to be working, but must present a "blacksmith working," hammering the anvil with the utmost concrentation; the shepherd is never simply shivering in a field wondering how long it will be before he gets home to his mutton stew, but is a "shepherd herding," crook in hand, posed as if looking too-strenuously for a lost sheep; a lady never empties a chamber pot whilst yelling at her kids, but is trapped forever in time as "woman emptying chamberpot." In an educational museum, of course, such caricatures serve a legitimate purpose. But in a novel seeking to recreate a thriving London scene, the mentions of the names of Cromwell, Erasmus, Seymour, Henry VIII all just seem to coincidental to be true to life. They have the quality of mannequins, lacking individual character and there simply for a purpose of the events which they illustrate. The historical novel must cling to the world's realism more than other genres, since history has actually happened, and the fiction inhabits that genuine - if now lost - world, rather than emerging from a timeless authorial imagination. Oddly, though, the more the historical novel strives for realistic detail the more it over-reaches its remit as a novel, a work of fiction.

If the opening of the novel is overloaded with pop-history, a different but related problem arises when the writer cannot assume his reader's general knowledge. Consider this exchange between the detective-hero, Shardlake, and his assistant, Mark, as they ride past a church:

All the windows of the church were filled with candles, a rich glow filtering through the stained glass. The bell tolled, on and on.
"The All Souls' service," Mark observed.
"Yes, the whole village will be in church praying for the relief of their dead in purgatory."

Now can we really imagine that the Mark who knows instinctively what date the bells are tolling on really needs to be told the significance of this particular service by Shardlake? Of course not. But then, the information is not really directed to him, even though conveyed in dialogue, but to the secular, modern reader. When even dialogue, the most vernacular of representative modes, is turned to the demands of history rather than simply inhabiting it, the whole artifice of the novel is exposed. The problem is that it is trying to perform two incompatible aims: to render a period realistically, whilst providing an entertaining and plausible work of fiction.

So this leads me to my first, general question: are good historical novels impossible to produce in a modern era when a reading public lacks a general grounding in social and religious history? As Andrew Motion observed recently, it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach English Literature because students do not know the Bible or classical mythology on which much of the canon is based. Even fifty years ago, one can imagine that the final sentence quoted above would not have needed to be written, because the author could expect a reader instinctively to know the meaning of All Soul's Day. The historical novel has been perhaps the most popular genre of recent times; one can bring immediately to mind Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels, Umberto Eco's The_Name_of_the_Rose, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, Bernard Cornwall's Sharp books, Allan Mallinson's Matthew Hervey series. Do these fictions suffer by being unable to stand as independent narratives in their own right, instead needing to convey history as information, rather than as the coincidental backdrop to the narrative, like the weather?

Not being an expert in this field, perhaps I am being unfair, which is why I present it as an open question. To look more specifically at this particular novel, though, another question springs to mind which is more specific, and can be illustrated by the following passage:

We made our way down Scarnsea's cobbled main street, where the top storeys of ancient houses overhung the road, keeping to one side to avoid the emptying of pisspots.

What is wrong here is the corollary to the didactic edge I have been complaining about. Again, we have the historical detailing. But that this is a problem may have something to do with this novel's narrative technique: first person narration. Keeping to one side of the street to avoid chamber pots is the sort of instinctive action that, in a character of its time, would have been entirely unconscious, and therefore not worth commenting upon. As with the dialogue quoted earlier, this moment exposes the didactic intention of historical fiction. But it is something we might object to less strongly if this information was relayed by an objective, omniscient, third-person narrator.

Such narrators act as discriminating eyes. They select what information we need to be told, and exclude other possibilities or unnecessary details. This is what John Fowles recognised in his postmodern reworking of the Victorian romance, The French Lieutenant's Woman. This historical novel is thick with metafiction, self-reflection on its own status and mechanisms as a novel (Linda Hutcheon would categorise this as a "historiographic metafiction.") In particular, Fowles presents himself as a character in the work, and likens himself to a puppeteer, pulling the strings of the love plot, presenting characters in certain beneficial or negative lights, and introducing modern paradigms of knowledge anachronistically into the Victorian period. Fowles seems to be saying that we cannot ever recapture history objectively, and any aspect or character of a period that is recollected is placed there, like props in a set, because the author requires it. History is made, not discovered, by the process of story.

Sansom's novel fails to realise this. By seeing events as if through the eyes of a character, it seems to be suggesting that such things could actually have happened, that these particular thoughts (avoiding chamberpots, acknowledging why the bells tolled) occured at the level of consciousness, and can therefore be written explicitly. Now I do not want to suggest the novel is not entertaining - I am certainly caught up by its tale of monastic murder. But it is compromised as a novel, a work of fiction, by clinging through the first person to the belief that a period can be seen now as it was seen then. I argue, however, that this is not the case, because between past and present the didactic intervenes, when to be successful any idea of a double-intention ought to be dissolved.

Labels: C.J. Sansom, didacticism, Dissolution, Literature