Thoughts on historical fiction

Fragments and Mirrors
When we view the past through the lens of the present, what do we lose?

By Nathaniel Popkin - The Smart Set

The critic James Woods, disdainful of the cold and calculating set piece of historical fiction, finds something else in Hilary Mantel’s recent Bring up the Bodies, the breathless follow up to her Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall: the ring of the contemporary. “One of the reasons for this literary success,” Woods writes in the New Yorker, “is that Mantel seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties.”

   

But is it quite so easy? And is there not a cost to portraying figures from the past as if they were in effect mirrors of our own reality? In his new collection of essays, Waiting for the Barbarians, the classicist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn says the danger is that we risk losing the particular reality of the period and place that’s being interpreted — and worse, we may be getting it wrong. Contemporary interpretations of the ancient poet Sappho, whose work only survives in fragments, he says, are rife with this kind of manipulation. “Many classics scholars have been wondering whether Sappho’s poems meant something wholly different to her and her original audience from what their partial remains mean to us,” he writes, in the essay, “In Search of Sappho.”
Which reality, then, ought historical fiction address: ours, with all its textures and biases, or the reality of say, England in 1536 or Ancient Greece? I’ve found myself grappling with this question in the writing of a novel, The Book of Masters (forthcoming in 2013 on the Head and the Hand Press), about the tragic 1821 death of American genre painter John Lewis Krimmel. I started thinking about transforming Krimmel’s story into a novel when I was 32, the same age Krimmel was when he died. Indeed, as a long-time documenter of the life of Philadelphia, where Krimmel lived, sketching and painting street scenes and inside taverns and market stalls, I saw myself mirrored in him. The novel would be a contemporary one that happened to be set in the early 19th century. I had no intention to create a work, as Woods puts it, “entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity.”
I felt all the more justified in thinking this way because the historical characters I would portray were themselves, in the forging of a new American reality, rather wantonly pillaging the fragments of Western civilization, from imperial England to Ancient Greece. Indeed, the antagonist of The Book of Masters is Charles Willson Peale, who named his own children after the great masters—among them Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, even Sappho — and who sought to train them in the arts by having them learn from copies of the great paintings.