History As Pastoral, History As a Source of Drama

2 History as Pastoral, History as a Source of Drama Samuel Johnson was alive to the perils of approaching literary works with inappropriate demands. Realizing that anyone who read Rich ardson for the story would hang himself, he suggested that we read him "for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." Johnson's remarks reveal an interest in the function and hierarchy of the parts that constitute artistic wholes; he recog nizes the importance of determining whether one aspect of a work of art exists for the sake of another. I do not intend to suggest that we read all historical novels for the history, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the history, but in this chapter and the next one, I do want to take a close look at the different roles history has played in standard historical fiction. Tzvetan Todorov asserts that there are two possible ways to arrive at generic groupings: "theoretical genres" stem from "a deduction of a theoretical order," whereas "historical genres" stem from "an ob servation of literary reality."1 My interest in the uses of history in fic tion is neither purely theoretical nor purely historical. Instead of at- 1. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970), trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 13-15. In my view, the clearest way to discuss the inner logic of individual works and larger lit erary systems is in terms of the fiction of authorial intentions and the problems and choices that result from those intentions, and I do so throughout. Some such fiction, whether about authorial intentions, reader reception, or the self-sustaining, intrinsic properties of individual works or larger semiotic systems, necessarily underlies any at tempt to discuss literary structure. 5 2 THE FORMS OF HISTORICAL FICTION tempting to imagine all the possible ways in which history might enter historical fiction, I shall concentrate on the uses that have dominated artistic practice. But I also want to understand the logic behind their existence and functioning. I have argued that we cannot isolate a sin gle historical vision that all standard historical novels share, except in a minimal way, but nothing prevents us from describing the various roles history plays in these works. My method will be to explore a few carefully chosen novels. Scott, the primary focus of my study, will play a major role here; I shall also draw some examples from French and Russian fiction, where certain tendencies exist in a clearer and more interesting form than they do in the relatively impoverished tra dition of nineteenth-century English historical fiction after Scott. The ways in which history has been employed in standard historical fiction fall into a small number of broad categories, which are not particularly recondite and have been individually recognized, implic itly or explicitly, by previous critics. My intention is to synthesize and extend the best of their insights. I shall argue that works of standard historical fiction have employed history in three main ways. First, his tory has provided an ideological screen onto which the preoccupa tions of the present can be projected for clarification and solution, or for disguised expression. I refer to this use as "history as pastoral." Second, history (here conceived of as inherently colorful and dra matic) has acted as a source of dramatic energy that vivifies a fictional story. Such dramatic energy can produce effects that are melodra matic and insubstantial, but it can also produce catharsis. Finally and obviously, history has acted as the subject of historical novels, in a va riety of ways. These different uses of history often coexist in a given novel. But the sense we make of a historical novel, or of any character or scene within it, depends upon our conception of its purpose. We will have very different notions about the meaning of a Waverley hero and the novel he inhabits, for instance, depending on whether we be lieve that his primary purpose is to project and consolidate present day values, or to go through a series of dramatic adventures, or to act as an instrument through which Scott expresses a view of history. Though all of these uses of history may coexist in a work, they are likely at any given moment to fall into a hierarchy in which one of them predominates, and adequate interpretation depends upon recog nizing this hierarchy. HISTORY AS PASTORAL, HISTORY AS DRAMA 5 3 Why should these uses of history have dominated standard histori cal fiction? Two kinds of answers come to mind. If we think in terms of literary and cultural history, it is clear that some novels were bound to use history as their subjects after the rise of historicism. Us ing history as a source of drama seems an equally natural step, espe cially because of the importance of creating dynamic movement in a plotted action. It is also not surprising that nineteenth-century society, which had recently learned to think of history in a new way and felt itself in crisis, used fiction to project its problems onto the past in the hopes of clarifying or solving them. On a more theoretical level, we can follow Hegel in taking the rela tionship between present and past in historical works to determine their modes.2 There are then two main possibilities: modes in which present concerns predominate and modes in which an interest in the past predominates. The category of history as pastoral is clearly an example of a mode in which the past is used to serve the present. So is the use of history as a source of drama, though in a much narrower way: in such works, the past fulfills the need for an intense imagina tive experience in the present. My final category, history as subject, covers those works primarily interested in the past. Of course a fur ther theoretical possibility exists. What of works that balance past and present interests? I believe that in standard historical fiction, this possibility is rarely if ever actualized. In the novels that come closest to achieving such a balance, an interest in the past still predominates. The needs of the present are compelling; they are likely to upset the balance and hence require a strong historicist counterweight. The wary reader will have noticed that my three uses of history im ply a simpler distinction between more and less truly historical vi sions. Whatever their other merits, novels that use history as pastoral or as a source of drama will lack the potentiality to be as richly and integrally historical as novels that find their subject in history. In the previous chapter, I pointed out the dangers of using a distinction be tween true and false historicity as the basic tool in approaching his torical fiction, but we can hardly escape such judgments altogether. I do not wish to produce a value-free account of my subject, but in- 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 5 4 THE FORMS OF HISTORICAL FICTION stead to provide a mode of analysis in which value judgments do not immediately homogenize and distort phenomenological perceptions. Once we are able to recognize the different kinds of roles history plays in fiction, questions about the relative historicity of different fic tional structures are inescapable and useful. An attempt to meet works on their own generic terms does not mean that we will con sider equally valuable all that we find: to understand is not to forgive. I should reemphasize that a historical novel may well employ history in a variety of ways as it proceeds. We are looking for what the Rus sian Formalists might have called the historical "dominant" of a work; this does not imply excluding other kinds of historical inten tions and effects, only putting them in their places.3 The need to decide which uses of history are present in a given novel, and which one predominates, involves some necessary compli cations, since historical novels are notoriously capacious, sprawling, and disunified. We will find ourselves discussing works that change intention as they proceed or have competing intentions throughout. This procedure need not be viewed with alarm or suspicion. What ought to make us suspicious are critical methods that find a hidden consistency and higher unity in works that have always seemed to readers very baggy monsters indeed, and my approach attempts to provide an alternative to such methods. HIST ORY AS PASTORAL One of the most important ways in which the nineteenth century em ployed history is as pastoral. A wide variety of Victorian works in po etry and prose use history as a testing ground for social visions fo cused not on the past but on the present or future. In News from Nowhere, William Morris projects an idealized vision of the Middle Ages into a utopian future: he uses history as a quarry from which to select materials to build a society embodying values of which he ap proves. In Idylls of the King, Tennyson uses the Middle Ages in a sim ilar way, though with little of Morris's conception of medieval society as an organic whole. One function of Arthur's England is to serve as a region where Tennyson can work out a quasi-allegorical vision of nineteenth-century England's moral degradation; at the same time, it 3. Roman Jakobson, "The Dominant," in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed.

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