"the literary assumptions of yore" (on historical fiction, pt. 2)

As I wrote in July, I think the term "historical fiction" is, in our current literary culture, often misused or misapplied—though, as the term's become less a critical marker of genre than simply another way of packaging and selling a product (if there's even a distinction there), I should probably let it go: in any event, I feel the term no longer applies, if it ever did, to a number of novels that treat history or that are set in the past, but that are less interested in fetishizing the details of that past than in undertaking some other project.

In a post at The Reading Experience a few days back, Daniel Green notes a review of a dull-sounding Alan Cheuse novel by way of offering some thoughts about historical fiction:

[I]n a period when "serious" novelists are turning to historical fictions in what seems to me unprecedented numbers (all five of the 2008 National Book Award fiction nominees could arguably be called historical novels), recreating the historical past in this way has increasingly become a privileged strategy among both writers and critics, garnering many critical plaudits and prestigious prizes. It is apparently one of the most recognizably "novel-like" things a writer might attempt these days.

But this is so only because most historical novels...invoke the most conventional, hidebound notions of what a "novel" is and does, reinforced by these novels' emphasis on story—enhanced by the broader arc of historical "story" that such novels want to expropriate—on "character" as embodied in "real people," on staged scenes dominated by "realistic" dialogue, all wrapped up in a transparent prose style occasionally colored by poetic flourishes and applications of "psychological realism." This approach threatens to recalcify fiction in its own historically contingent, now thoroughly reductive form. A "novel" becomes simply a narrative of events modeled on the writing of history, except that the characters can be made up and the story tweaked here and there. If the true purpose of the historical novel is to return us not just to the recounted days but also the literary assumptions of yore, then I guess its practicioners are to some extent succeeding.

Green goes on to name such novels the "earnest brand of historical fiction"—thus perhaps exempting the novels I named in my post in July. Still, I think Green looks at history—what he calls "the historical past"—too narrowly in his critique of such novels because, again, many novels published now have some interest in treating the past, whether that past is decades back or the proverbial five-minutes-ago: the tropes Green describes in the paragraphs above apply not only to those novels marketed as historical fiction, but also to the vast majority of novels. A novel imagining the interior life of Muhammad Atta, or that of Laura Bush, is as much fictionalized history as a novel set in some previous century if the novel's main project is, as I wrote in July, "obsessive cultural-historical documentation." Jonathan Franzen, in his well-known 1996 Harper's essay, "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels," asserted that "[a]lthough good novelists don't deliberately seek out trends, they do feel a responsibility to dramatize important issues of the day," and glorified what he called the "culturally engaged novel" even as he wrestled with the question of how much "news" the novel should bring its readers.

What bores me about so much current fiction, whether its publishers would label it historical or not, is that, to quote Green again, "most...novels...invoke the most conventional, hidebound notions of what a 'novel' is and does, reinforced by these novels' emphasis on story." To this I would add that the conventional idea of the novel as bringing the reader information—what Franzen, in the same essay, calls "those things-in-the-world that impinge on the enterprise of fiction writing"—also bores me to the point that I find it nearly impossible to read novels that appear designed mainly to do so: in an era of far too much information-peddling (most of it beyond useless), I am far more interested in reading a well-crafted sentence, or enjoying a paragraph of musical prose, than in reading any novel that purports to offer me some top-down sense of how things are—as if I didn't already know, as if I weren't already drowning in the awareness of such things, as if our entire culture hasn't been built on the packaging and distribution of such imposed narratives.

Postscript: I began writing this post two days ago, but Daniel Green's updated his blog today with a newer post wondering how useful the term "novel" remains; much of what he writes here applies, I think, equally well to the term "historical fiction":

Devotees of "exploratory" prose would not have to contend, or would have to contend less, with objections that a particular work of experimental fiction is not "really" a novel, because it would indeed not be such and could perhaps be more honestly assessed according to criteria appropriate to what it is rather than what it is not....

Such a dispensation would have the added benefit of eliminating obtrusive discussions of "art" where the novel is concerned, since whatever art it would still be granted would be confined to minor variations on pre-established methods, and everyone still reading novels would be able to concentrate their attention on the "ideas" they supposedly express, the political efficacy they're claimed to have, the sociological observations they're said to make, or just the nice stories they're counted on to tell, all of which, as far as I can tell, are of much greater interest to readers of conventional novels than aesthetic values or formal ingenuity.