The Ghosts of History, Fiction

Stephen Greenblatt calls Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall "a startling achievement, brilliant...," but it must be said that his own essay that draws from her novel is itself outstanding. Greenblatt, the author of the wonderful Will in the World, spins his book review into an expansive reflection on the purpose and possibilities of historical fiction.

Greenblatt notes that the historical novel is defined not merely by being set in the past; Middlemarch, he writes, was set about forty years earlier than its publication date, but it is understood to be more of a domestic drama focused on the fictional Dorothea Brooke. War and Peace might be closer to manifesting a historical novel--it does feature Napoleon as a character, as well as catalyzing historical events--but it too is primarily invested in the storylines of fictional protagonists.

So what the heck is historical fiction? And what makes it matter? Greenblatt writes:

In the most fully realized historical novels, the historical figures are not merely background material or incidental presences but the dominant characters, thoroughly reimagined and animated. They are at the center of our attention, and their actions in the world seem to carry the burden of a vast, unfolding historical process that is most fully realized in small, contingent, local gestures. Those gestures are ordinarily hidden from official chroniclers, but they are the special purview of the historical novelist. ...

Historical novels have a further characteristic. They generate a sense in the reader best summed up in exclamations like "Yes, this is the way it must have been"; "This is how they must have sounded"; "This is what it must have felt like." Historical accuracy is not the issue: scrutiny of [Thomas] Cromwell's surviving letters suggests that he probably did not sound very much like [Hilary] Mantel's hero. What matters is the illusion of reality, the ability to summon up ghosts.

The historical novel then is always an act of conjuring.