Praising Irresponsible History and Fiction’s “Misuse” of the Past by Christy Zink
Writing about history means reconciling history, recognizing that we’re only ever getting partial truths from the past world. How close we hew to the supposed fact that carries forward has everything to do with where we stand in relation to the archive or the artifact. It all depends on whether we chance to believe the story we’ve already heard behind it or whether we opt, instead, to hear the invisible voice and create the uncertain tale, inventing our own, alternate history.
An exchange in Katherine Weber’s smart and compelling new novel Triangle points to the complex work of the historian. When a scholar of women’s history wears out her welcome but still carries on, casting aspersions on a scholar who’s come before her, her host shoots back, “Maybe he cared more about humanity than posterity.” But the scholar persists—“That is not the place of the true historian.”
What delight it is, then, when human truth overthrows the accurate record—when novelists take the responsibility of history and show it on out the door. While Weber’s novel involves history, it’s not slavish to excruciating period detail and also stakes its claim equally firmly in the present. It makes its own truth up and over mere fact.
Weber’s work has gotten me thinking over the past few days not only of how fiction both uses history for its own devices but can also make wild play with the world that’s come before, remaking it all over again on the page. Fiction writers do so, often, not in the sprawling, epic way we may first think of historical fiction, but in many cases with precision, compactness, and immediacy in the forms of short novel or short story collections.
Listed below are a handful of books that I think make good—and I hope somewhat unexpected—company to Weber’s book and her concentrated treatment of history and story and the innumerable, “irresponsible,” utterly humane ways that the two can owe one to another.
The Invention of Truth. Marta Morazzoni (translated from by M.J. Fitzgerald), like Weber, uses both fine art and the art of the stitch, in her brief novel—a novella, really—that seams together work by expert needlewomen on the Bayeux tapestry with that of Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Morazzoni lets Ruskin, whom she’s fictionalized, have the important word on history in his own real words: “We can imagine falsities, we can compose falsehoods, but only truth can be invented.”
Invisible Cities. Italo Calvino reimagines conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan as Polo returns from his travels across Khan’s kingdom to describe the strange wonders found in those lands. But are the conversants the lauded historical figures, or just two beggars of the same name picking through garbage, or both? This book that reminds us that “there is no language without deceit” is also the encapsulation of Calvino’s love affair with the city of Venice. Each of the portraits Polo draws expands a new facet of “the city that remains implicit”—the glorious and secretive city of canals, past and present and future in a splendid crossing over of memory, desire, symbols, the sky, the dead, and life, confusing life, of shared spaces.
Corregidora. Gayl Jones not just traces but hunts down the legacy of generations of violence and bears that down through these pages. The protagonist must reckon with her lineage connected to the white slave owner who raped her great grandmother, a woman who tells and retells her story, recording and “leav[ing] the evidence” by the necessary passing of terrible stories down along the maternal line. There’s no escaping these lessons, especially when the violence repeats from the hands of a new man against a new woman, and here history intertwines through Jones’ language in dream and startling, harrowing physical reality.
Various Antidotes. Joanna Scott’s books all grapple with history in fascinating ways, and everything she’s ever written deserves a careful and loving read. But a perfect place to start is with this story collection that brings front and center as lead characters Anton von Leewenhoek—purveyor of the “secret microscopic life” under his carefully ground lens, Frances Huber and his mastery of the language of bees, Dorothea Dix’s defense of the mad, itself tinged with madness, and Charlotte Corday with her sharp knife to be drawn into the skin of Marat. These are no mere retellings; they are placements into the minds of witnesses, who know the actual secrets of history, whose stories get buried under the more convenient or convenient tale that can never hold the real truth.
The Death of Napoleon. It’s telling that the author himself of this book doesn’t truly exist—Simon Levy is, in fact, a pen name for the art historian Pierre Ryckmans. (He also translated the book from French along Patricia Clancy). This brief novel asks a perplexing and provocative question: What if the news of Napoleon’s death, trumpeted across Europe, was a complete and utter lie? In this version of history, a look-alike makes his way to St. Helena while the real Napoleon boards a Portuguese seal-hunting vessel and returns to the continent to live a secret life in a sort of sardonic second chance. Napoleon himself faces head-on the challenge between humanity and posterity, losing both in the strange bargains he’s made by giving away the most irretrievable thing—the single and unique identity that makes us who we recognizably are.
Wolf Whistle. At age 15, Lewis Nordan heard the news from a nearby town of a boy one year younger than him who met a terrible end. That story from his own history was one that would have resonance throughout American culture, as that dead boy was Emmett Till, a black boy from Chicago, lynched by a group of white men, allegedly for wolf-whistling at a white woman. Till serves as the centerpoint of Nordan’s book that explores wildly, imaginatively, Southernly, and Shakespeareanly the ramifications of this horrible act of terror through the fictional town of Arrow Catcher. Nordan tells it best himself, writing in an essay that “It is a serious story, about death and grief and broken hearts, and in which credibility is key, but it exists on a plane, sometimes comic, even burlesque, just askew of the ‘real,’ historical universe. That is my intention and my point: to render the natural world as itself and, at the same time, as unearthly.”
By design, this is far from a complete list (Weber’s own book The Music Lesson also deserves a look, for example); so, THB readers, can you suggest more books here that twist and turn history to make good, unexpected shorter novels or short story collections?
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