The Forms of Historical Fiction

The Forms of Historical Fiction The Forms of Historical Fiction Sir Walter Scott and His Successors By Harry E. Shaw CiD Cornell University Press · Ithaca and London Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. Copyright © 1983 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1983 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaw, Harry E., 1946– The forms of historical fi ction : Sir Walter Scott and his successors. Includes index. 1. Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771–1832—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771–1832—Infl uence. 3. Historical fi ction. I. Title. PR5343.H5S5 1983 823'.17 83-5354 ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-1592-0 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2326-1 (pbk.) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Cover illustration: Portrait of Sir Walter Scott by Sir Henry Raeburn, reproduced by permission of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. FOR }UDY JENSVOLD Contents PREFACE 9 A NOTE ON CITATIONS OF SCOTT'S WORKS 15 I. AN APPROACH TO THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 19 2. HISTORY AS PASTORAL, HISTORY AS A SOURCE OF DRAMA 51 3· HISTORY AS SUBJECT 100 4. FORM IN Scorr's NovELS: THE HERO AS INSTRUMENT 150 5. FoRM IN Scorr's NovELS: THE HERO AS SUBJECT 212 INDEX 253 Preface Few intellectual developments in the last two hundred years have af fected us more profoundly than the enriched sense of historicity which emerged in the late eighteenth century. In various ways, this historical sense informs the works of Herder, Ranke, and Marx-and the novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Scott. Though we may attempt to repudiate it, it is constitutive of our intellectual and moral worlds. Given such a situation, one might expect the historical novel to have attained a privileged place in the ranks of literature. Instead, the form suffers from neglect, even contempt. This book proceeds from the conviction that the historical novel de serves a closer, more reasoned appraisal than it usually receives. His torical fiction merits such attention for a number of reasons, which include but transcend simple critical justice and the possibility of dis covering new sources of esthetic pleasure. The problems historical novels have with history and we have with historical novels are po tentially instructive. They can help to reveal limits in the esthetic forms we most prize-knowledge that matters for those who employ imaginative forms to make sense of the world. A clearer understand ing of the workings of historical fiction can also clarify certain aspects of the nature of history itself, and of our situations as historical be mgs. In all these areas, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the first and ar guably the greatest historical novelist in the modern sense, are exem plary, and they therefore have special prominence in this book. Scott's IO PREFACE works are exemplary, first of all, in being neglected. Despite some stirrings of a Scott revival in recent years, the Waverley Novels re main the least-appreciated and least-read body of major fiction in English. For anyone who admires historical fiction, this situation stands as an affront and a challenge. But the current neglect of Scott also raises questions that transcend the history of taste. Is there some thing about his novels themselves, or about nineteenth-century histor ical fiction in general, which resists our favored modes of analysis? Is the relationship between Scott and the larger traditions of the novel more problematical than it may appear to be? Is critical suspicion of Scott to some extent justified, and if so, on what grounds? This book responds to these questions and others like them. By discriminating between different roles history can play in historical novels, it seeks to present a fruitful approach to Scott's novels and to nineteenth-century historical fiction in general. This approach departs in certain ways from those employed, often to good effect, by others who have attempted to lift the historical novel from its present obscurity. The most significant attempt in this century to reassert the importance of historical fiction and of Scott did so by exploring the process by which history comes to human consciousness in art. If something of a Scott revival is afoot in the English-speaking world, this must in part be attributed to the transla tion of Georg Lukacs's The Historical Novel in 1 962. Lukacs values Scott precisely because he embodies a critical moment in the develop ment of our knowledge of history. Lukacs has shed much light on Scott and on historical fiction generally, and I am greatly indebted to him. But the strength of his approach is also its weakness. His story of the development of historical consciousness finds its climax, not in the creation of increasingly rich historical novels, but in the emer gence of works that can register the present as history. For Lukacs's own purposes, this procedure is entirely justified and yields impressive results. But by shifting the focus away from historical fiction as a phe nomenon in its own right, his developmental vision unavoidably re duces Scott in particular, and historical fiction in general, to the status of forerunners. It invites us to think of Scott perhaps as a John the Baptist, more likely as a pigmy on whose shoulders giants stand, and then to look beyond him. Lukacs has provided what is likely to be the definitive historical PREFACE I I study of historical fiction. I treat historical fiction in terms that are primarily synchronic. I concentrate on the representational possibili ties and limitations of historical fiction, as exemplified by Scott's nov els as well as by certain other works in the European realist tradition. Such an approach is appropriate to nineteenth-century historical nov els, because (as I indicate in my first chapter) they lack an indepen dent history of their own. In larger terms, a dialectical tension be tween the synchro nic and the diachronic is part of historicism itself, for historicism can lead to visions of emerging historical process like Hegel's, but it can also promote an appreciation of systematic cultural uniqueness and irreducible historical difference. A synchronic treatment of Scott's novels is also a less paradoxical enterprise than it might seem. When he began writing novels Scott was in his forties and fully formed as a thinker and an artist. He pro duced good and bad novels throughout his career, and only with dis tortion can his works be made to fit a developmental pattern. My dis cussion reveals two moments when he engaged in significant though short-lived departures from his normal fictional practices, first by us ing his fiction primarily to explore contemporary concerns and later by making his protagonist the true center of two novels. These mo ments are unusual: except for the decline in his final works, such trends as exist in his career as a novelist are best explained on grounds other than personal growth or artistic development. In my discussion of Scott, I have felt compelled to disagree with ef forts to show that history is not his ultimate concern, or to assimilate his works too directly to the norms of the novelists who followed him. If Scott is really trying to do the same things in the same ways as his successors, he does them much less well and deserves obscurity. It is also important not to defend Scott by concentrating on a favored kind of Waverley Novel and forgetting that he created a number of different kinds of historical fiction. To be sure, certain Waverley Nov els are better left in oblivion. But much of Scott's greatness lies in his variety. One of my objects has been to promote an awareness of this variety by describing in a systematic way the different kinds of novel istic structure in which it is embodied. A discussion of historical fiction quickly extends into areas of daunting complexity and importance. I have tried to strike a balance between giving such issues the attention they deserve and producing a I2 PREFACE study focused on a manageable subject. Thus I deal in some detail with certain aspects of Lukacs, but avoid the controversies that have swirled around his name and methods, particularly since his death. Lukacs always appeared to have something to tell us about nine teenth-century realism, and the time may come when, instead of dis missing his attack on modernism by calling him a Stalinist or fetishist or closet bourgeois, we will respond to the moral challenge it pre sents, for all its shortcomings. I also avoid discussing the representa tion of history in novels set in the recent past or the present. I believe that the representational problems that shape historical fiction touch such works as well, but in ways complex enough to demand a much longer discussion than I can here provide. Finally, I discuss only cer tain aspects of the problem of whether history (or anything else) can be represented in fiction, and indeed of whether history can be known or experienced at all.

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