I DON’T DO THIS for just anybody, but since you’ve stayed with me this long, here’s some advice. You want to win a Nobel Prize? Literature, now. We’re not talking economics or peace or physics or any of those others. Just literature. Here’s what you need to do: study history. Think I’m kidding? Try these two lists and see if I’m wrong.
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Not bad, either group, right? So what separates them? Talent? Technique? Form? Not really. Generalizations are tricky, but we can say that the group on the right is, on the whole, more oriented toward historical and social issues. And the group on the left won zero Nobel Prizes. None. All of the Column B writers are winners. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Consider the Booker Prize for British writers. A few years back the judges chose a supreme winner, the Booker of Bookers for the first twenty-five years of the prize’s existence. The winner as the most Bookerish of novels? Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. If you’ve not read it (and you should), it’s about a group of children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment of India’s birth as an independent nation. How’s that for history?
There is perhaps no genre more despised in critical circles than the “historical novel.” Okay, maybe the romance. And particularly the historical romance. At the same time, however, we must distinguish between the category novel (“category” or “genre” novels being written to a preset form) we call “historical” and the genuinely historical novel. There have always been historical novels, books that look seriously back—or sometimes sideways—at the great contest of historical forces. Leo Tolstoy did well with contemporary novels like Anna Karenina, but his BIG novel, the one that makes him TOLSTOY, is War and Peace, a little fourteen-hundred-page ditty about the war against Napoleon. It’s vast in scope as well as length, and it resembles nothing but itself. It’s filled with characters and storylines and digressive essays that simply pop up in the midst of the narrative. Critics at the time had difficulty regarding it as a novel, standing as it did so far beyond the scope of anything they understood a novel to be.
What are these days called “postcolonial” or “multicultural” or “emerging” novels are generally playing fields on which history runs rampant, and sometimes amok. This is hardly surprising. If the history of your people, your island, your country was dominated by some outside power for several hundred years, when that power withdrew or altered its relationship, that shift could hardly be ignored in your writing, could it?
Take an instance from our own country. Native American writers as otherwise different as Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich have this in common: the stories they tell grow directly out of the tribal and regional histories of their people. Silko’s Ceremony (1977) deals with the return of a G.I. from World War II to his reservation in the desert Southwest. What Tayo has experienced, and what his Laguna Pueblo tribe has gone through before he was even born, has everything to do with the shape of that narrative. His post-traumatic stress disorder, his biracial identity, his dislocation from the old ways, and his need to become whole and well again all drive the novel forward. Tribal history, national history, and personal history dictate the story Silko composes. Similarly, one could argue that Erdrich’s Kashpaw-Nanapush saga grows out of no single feature of Chippewa history as much as the land allotment system forced upon the people by the Bureau of Land Management, that nearly all the resentments and rivalries, the manifold failures and occasional triumphs, ultimately stem from that one cause. The stories in Welch, in Momaday, even in something as screwy and amazing as Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978, 1990), which would take more space to explain than is occupied by the book itself, always have to do at some level with issues of accommodation, assimilation, separation, and the uneasy play of identity for those Americans who also belong to other, long-oppressed nations. The novels may be hilarious or heartbreaking—often both—yet the interaction between fictional creation and the forces of history are undeniable and inescapable.
We see much the same thing in any ethnic American fiction, although most clearly perhaps in African American writing. Perhaps because the history involved is so horrific, not merely the dealing in human beings as commodities, although that in itself is quite bad enough, but also because of the brutalities of slavery and plantation life, the oppression on a grand scale that followed for a century after emancipation, and the ongoing effects of that history, African American novels possess a power that is hard to match. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) can only have come out of a certain pattern of experience, one which no one would wish for himself, yet it implicates all of us in its tragedy. The novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin capture black life seventy and eighty years after slavery, making something both familiar and strange out of the experience. Sometimes black striving with the slave-holding past is comic, as in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990), sometimes tragic or strange, as in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1992—and African Caribbean or African British comes into the picture here, as well), about a freed slave who finds himself re-enslaved, or Edward P. Jones’s account of blacks who owned slaves in The Known World (2003). Sometimes, it is all those things, which is part of why Toni Morrison may be the greatest novelist of our time. Even her failures (and I have read Jazz) are fascinating. And in her best work, in Song of Solomon (1977) or Beloved (1987) or Paradise (1998), the sense that history has come alive and is animating characters in ways they can’t quite understand or appreciate permeates the narratives. And the prose simply takes your breath away. Sadly, that history will never leave us but will go on providing material for novelists for a thousand years. And all the novels in the world can’t justify or erase the enormity of slavery and racism.
The specific issues differ in postcolonial writing, whether from India, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the British Isles, or the Caribbean, and of course they differ from country to country and culture to culture, yet always history announces itself in fiction, frequently in quite overt ways. The original Troubles in Ireland, those spasms of nationalism that eventually led to independence for the twenty-six counties of the Republic of Ireland, from the Easter Rising of 1916 through the Black and Tan War against English soldiers after the Great War, to the Irish civil war, figure down the years from Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer (1925) to William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune (1983) and beyond. At the time the Black and Tans were dispatched to Ireland, Prime Minister David Lloyd George said, “We have murder by the throat.” Establishing a pattern, that one didn’t go quite as predicted. The later Troubles, the ones in Northern Ireland, show up in such disparate works as Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1997) and Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which an elderly woman in the Irish Republic is held hostage in her own home by a fugitive IRA terrorist. O’Brien employs the Lloyd George quote as an epigraph to the novel. There are numerous other novels, poems, plays, and memoirs on the Troubles, and there will be many, many more down the years. As I write this chapter, the British Army has just pulled out of Northern Ireland. It went into the province in 1969, the government’s idea being that the deployment would last a few months; it lasted, in fact, thirty-eight years and cost over thirty-seven hundred lives, military and civilian. How can such a period not color the writing by residents and onlookers?
Becoming a nation is never simple or easy. Establishing a national identity can be even more arduous and can take many more decades. This process is something Americans know a great deal about, whether they’re aware of it or not. Try this experiment. Read several works from any emerging nation. Make sure to read more than one author, and a lot of authors would be useful. Read R. K. Narayan, one of the Malgudi books or even The Painter of Signs (1976), and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Midnight’s Children (1981), or pretty much any Rushdie, and maybe Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975). Feel free to make substitutions. Read Desai’s mother, Anita, instead. Pick and choose. The writers and titles don’t matter all that much, except that good writers make the best reading. Now here’s the experimental part: don’t read them as strange visitors from someplace you’ve never been. Read them as if you’re one of them, or they’re one of you. Read them as if they’re nineteenth-century American novelists. Here’s what I think you’ll find: minus the surface details, it’s the same project as the one undertaken by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. They’re trying to figure out and articulate something that has never existed before, an identity as part of a newly established country separate from that same place and that same people under colonial rule but also (in the case of India, which is vastly older than British rule) from what it had been before, which in any case no one living ever experienced. They’re trying to work in a received literary form and adapt it to the sensibility and the reality of their time and place. Kiran Desai isn’t Mark Twain—her adaptation must needs be a far cry from his—but she’s certainly not Jane Austen or Iris Murdoch, either. Oh, and while you’re on the case, read her comic novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), which deserves reading for the title alone.
You can do the same experiment with Nigerian fiction, with Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka and others, or with Naguib Mahfouz and Egyptian fiction or with any place or people. I have for many years been a big fan of Latin American fiction, of García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende and Jorge Amado. I have even read Osman Lins, and that takes some effort, even to find him. One of the many things I like, of course, is how they can take me away from the world I know, from suburbs and soybean fields. But I’m always struck more, ultimately, by the “American” than by the “Latin,” by how familiar their quests are to someone who grew up with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, Natty Bumppo and Ishmael. Once I started reading other literatures, I discovered that “American” didn’t even have to enter into it. “It” was about the very human activity of inward voyaging and outward looking, of invention and discovery through the grappling with one’s history and culture, however new or old. I think you’ll find much the same thing going on, the process of self-discovery and identity creation through fiction. The history connection isn’t always as straightforward as The Scarlet Letter; sometimes it looks more like The House of the Seven Gables. But it’s at work, this wrestling with history. The experiment is interesting. Just don’t forget to notice how different and wonderful these “similar” novels are.
Remember our two columns up above, and what separates them? Here’s the second question about them: how are they alike? Honestly, I should have made a career with the SAT. Famous? Sure. Capable? That, too. How about, shot through with history? Joyce may have had Stephen Dedalus say, “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” but that doesn’t mean the author himself ever awoke, or could. Or even wanted to. Don’t forget, Stephen is plenty fatuous. And Joyce wasn’t. Among other things, he was among the early generations of Irish Catholics to have the opportunity of attending university. University College Dublin was founded by John Henry Cardinal Newman in 1854 and was necessary because they were, for the most part, excluded from Protestant Trinity College. Joyce came from ardent nationalist stock, from people who had looked to Thomas Stewart Parnell as the Moses who would lead them out of the wilderness of being second-class citizens governed by an imported minority. He lived through, if at a distance, the 1916 Easter Rising, the civil war, and the creation of the Irish Free State. He found himself somewhat closer to World War I and died in Zurich, having fled France after it fell to the Nazis. Does that sound like someone divorced from history? His books are filled with reminiscences and opinions, prejudices and beliefs about history, particularly but not exclusively the Irish variety. The world would be a poorer place without the terrible Christmas dinner row in Portrait or the Citizen’s fractured history lesson in Ulysses.
His literary descendent Roddy Doyle gave us wonderful comic characters and disastrous-hilarious situations in his Barrytown trilogy, starting with The Commitments, the first of the three novels, that one ostensibly about soul music but also so much more. The residents of his fictional Barrytown exist because of a particular history that created down-on-their-luck working-class neighborhoods that could give rise to a Jimmy Rabbitte, a young man with the right combination of pluck, vision, and naïveté to found a soul band in Dublin years after the original music died out. Jimmy is every bit as much the product of history as Henry Smart, the young revolutionary tough of Doyle’s A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing.
It even happens in children’s novels, or at least in great children’s novels. The Harry Potter novels have already been put through the interpretive mill, so I almost regret what I’m about to do. Still, it can’t be helped. I recently saw an article describing them as a literary political Rorschach test where people see what they’re already programmed to see. That may always be the case with literature, but we’ll leave that question for another day. This article cited such tricks of memory as the link of Azkaban prison to the American Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib detention facilities—nice work, since Rowling had invented her lockup for warlocks several years before these real-world jails had come into being. She can’t very well have known about things that had not yet happened, could she? She could know, however, about Nazis and fascists and Communist dictatorships, about totalitarian governments and those who would impose them. And she would know about racism and racial violence, which has been on the rise in Britain during her lifetime, as more and more racial minorities arrived. She would have seen neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers in action. What did she need with Guantánamo? Lord Voldemort (from the French vol de mort, meaning flight of death), with his sense of a mission and his self-loathing (his insistence on racial purity despite being of mixed nonmagical and witch parentage), his charisma and his cruelty, and his desperate need for eternal power, something like a Thousand-Year Reich, recalls Adolph Hitler. Does that mean that Voldemort is Hitler, that the book is an allegory for the rise of the Nazis? No, of course not. She’s much too subtle a thinker for something so crude, which would in any case be lost on her target audience. But if you are of the generation born in the twenty years or so after the end of World War II, as Rowling is, much of what you know about evil, about world domination fantasies, and about racial hatred and violence comes from the Nazis. And then there are the events. The fight at the tower that ends Book 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, owes not a little to the Battle of Britain, that quintessential desperate fight to save home. There has been, naturally, ample opportunity to understand cruelty by observing the world in the second half of the twentieth century, but much of that is simply a gloss on the Third Reich. The connection may be conscious or unconscious on Rowling’s part, but my guess is that she wouldn’t even need to think about it. Any English child born when she was would simply know about the years 1933–1945; the knowledge was unavoidable. It would inform the consciousness and therefore the fiction of any writer of her generation.
I know this because her generation is mine, although I’m on the far end of it from her. But there’s nothing special about J. K. Rowling, at least in this regard—it’s always true. All writers, everywhere, all the time. Here, then, is the Law of Now and Then: Every novel is an act of violence, a wrestling match with the historical and social forces of its own time. Sometimes the novel wins, sometimes history does. Okay, maybe not. But they do not play nicely together. What does happen is that sometimes history is apparent and sometimes it’s hidden. In either case, it’s always present and the writer has had to carve out the book’s place in its historical moment. Until we figure out a way not to live in our own time, we’re going to think like people of our own time. Every writer’s response to history will be a little different. You can reject it, embrace it, treat it as farce, but you can’t escape it.
There’s no one who isn’t of his or her own time and place. And those are to a large extent governed by history. Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom is unimaginable without postwar American society, his East-wick witches without, somewhere way back there, Salem and its trials. They may not look much like Salem’s witches, but they couldn’t exist without them. It has ever been thus. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels can tell us more about British attitudes toward colonialism, racism, exploration, imperialism, and what we now call Otherness than any ten textbooks or histories. That’s not the point of those novels, mind you; indeed, the writers might be shocked at the statement. It’s simply true. Sometimes history bites the writer on the derriere. Anthony Burgess has his four young thugs, Alex and his Droogs, beat up an old man, possibly a writer, and then brutalize a writer and his wife in their home, raping and beating her so badly she dies. This episode may have its origin in the beating and possible rape of Burgess’s first wife by four GIs. In Earthly Powers, the aging writer, based in large measure on Somerset Maugham, is beaten by street toughs. Burgess himself, in his later years, was mugged by young hoodlums in Rome. You never can tell what history has in mind for you.
The thing about history—like politics and sociology and psychology and bed-wetting—and the novel is that readers have to put in the work themselves. Is it significant when Ursula Brangwen, in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, calls a robin, disapprovingly, “a little Lloyd-George of the air”? It is if you think it is. Lawrence, whose pacifism and marriage to a German wife (a cousin of the Red Baron, no less) caused him considerable difficulty with authorities, despised Lloyd-George (who keeps cropping up in British fiction), the prime minister during World War I. The novel is otherwise largely oblivious of the mayhem taking place just across the Channel, and the main characters encounter no difficulty when plot exigencies require a trip to the Tyrol, yet current events, along with class warfare and industrial capitalism, do inform the book. How much and in what ways each reader must decide. And that decision will alter what we find in the novel.
This condition obtains almost universally; there are hardly any novels that do not in some way reveal their historical moment. A book may be set eight hundred years in the past or many centuries in the future, may even fly the bonds of Earth to some galaxy far, far away, but it’s still a product of now, whenever its now may have been. And now is always a product of then. History will come in, whether or no.
There. Don’t say I never did anything for you. And remember me in your acceptance speech.
John Updike