Integrity and Historical Research 2011010677, 9780415894364, 9780203804025

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Integrity and Historical Research

Routledge Approaches to History

1 Imprisoned by History Aspects of Historicized Life Martin Davies 2 Narrative Projections of a Black British History Eva Ulrike Pirker 3 Integrity and Historical Research Edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland

Integrity and Historical Research Edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Ave, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of the Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gibbons, Tony, 1934– Integrity and historical research / edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland. p. cm.—(Routledge approaches to history ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Historiography. 2. Historical fiction. 3. Literature and history. 4. Motion pictures in historiography. I. Sutherland, Emily. II. Title. D16.G495 2011 907.2—dc22 2011010677 ISBN: 978-0-415-89436-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-80402-5 (ebk)

Contents

Introduction 1

The Concept of Integrity

vii 1

TONY GIBBONS

2

‘Who Would Want to Believe That, Except in the Service of the Bleakest Realism?’ Historical Fiction and Ethics

13

JEROME DE GROOT

3

Transgressive Legacies of Memory: The Concept of Techné in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table

28

CĂTĂLINA BOTEZ

4

Fictions and Histories

48

PATRICIA DUNCKER

5

The Evil that Men Do Lives after Them, and the Good Is Oft Interred within Their Bones

65

EMILY SUTHERLAND

6

When Is It Time for ‘Writing with an Untrammelled Pen’? Reconciling the South Australian Settler Colony with Its Violent Past in Simpson Newland’s Historical Novel, Paving the Way: A Romance of the Australian Bush

86

RICK HOSKING

7

Using Lives: Working with Life Stories in a Time of Revolution NICHOLAS BROWN

108

vi Contents 8

Integrity and Oral History: Choices Facing the Oral Historian

131

ANGELA FRANKS

9

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’: Heloise and Abelard, Old Bones and the Uses of the Past

146

JUANITA FEROS RUYS

10 Integrity at the Intersection: Peripheries, Herstories and Film

167

MARÍA REIMÓNDEZ

11 Historians in Fiction and Film

187

DAVE MOSLER AND JESSICA MURRELL

Notes on Contributors Index

205 209

Introduction

‘Integrity’ is a word that fi nds its way into the diverse conversations that make up human intercourse. We talk of the integrity of systems we have not constructed and those that we have, of ecosystems and defence systems. We talk of the integrity of the ideas, theories and hypotheses that we formulate, and we talk of our own integrity. It is, it seems, a word for all seasons and all environments. As a result, one begins to doubt it might have any defi nite meaning; surely something with such a range is liable to be a little fuzzy around the edges. This book is the attempt to throw some light on the nature of integrity in historical research and, inter alia, to throw some light on integrity in other reaches of the human conversation. To do this, a group of people have been gathered together who are both acknowledged thinkers in the area and practitioners who have confronted the problems of integrity in their work with, and use of, historical research. So amongst the group are those who have written about the problems facing authors who use historical research and have themselves faced those same problems. There are those who have faced the problems of the oral historian who gathers material in a quite intimate environment; there are those who have faced the problems of the dramatist, the scriptwriter and director in paying service to accuracy on the one hand and to dramatic effect on the other hand. It would not be surprising if there were some broader result than something enlightening about integrity in the use of historical research. History is the most human of enquiries, and without some sense of history, of our human narrative both social and personal, we would be less than human. Accordingly, these chapters are presented as both an enquiry into integrity in the use of historical research and an enquiry into integrity.

1

The Concept of Integrity Tony Gibbons

The word ‘integrity’ is used in many contexts, from the integrity of an ecosystem or a database to the integrity of a person. In common usage the notion that ties these uses together is that of an uncorrupted whole. The ecosystem has integrity when it is unpolluted and uncorrupted by factors alien to its well-being and flourishing. Alien factors are those that are inconsistent with the overall purpose and development of the ecosystem. These factors may be external or internal. The introduction of an open cut coalmine in an old-growth forest is the introduction of an alien element and would clearly have an effect on the existing ecosystem. On the face of it the continued well-being of the ecosystem is in hazard. Whether or not this is an acceptable hazard is another matter. Not all ecosystems are in a state of dynamic equilibrium and may contain within themselves a factor that is inconsistent with their continued well-being. Integrity of an ecosystem is thus, on many occasions, an assessment of an hoped-for outcome rather than an existing state of affairs. Integrity in this context is unlikely to fulfil one hundred per cent of the requirements, and the term is assigned on the basis of meeting sufficient requirements. In a similar manner a person may be deemed to be a person of integrity because he or she is a person who is, as a whole, uncorrupted. This use of the term speaks of the person’s character and disposition to act in certain ways. The character of a person is a summation of the traits that go to make that character. If we say of a person that he or she is of good character, then we may be pointing to the fact that, in our estimation, that person possesses the character traits of justice, honesty, tolerance and the like. In other words they possess certain virtues. If a person is of bad character, then we estimate that his or her traits include a preponderance of traits such as maleficence, cowardice, mendaciousness, capriciousness, selfdeceptiveness, dishonesty, hypocrisy, fanaticism and the like. In a similar fashion if it is said that a person is one of integrity and this is queried, then the answer is framed in terms of the various character traits that person actively possesses. We say—well, he is honest, trustworthy and the like. In estimating that a person is one of integrity then, nowadays, we normally mean that he or she has a preponderance of those character traits we term virtues. Preponderance because, in the fi rst place, we do not expect fallible human beings to possess every virtue and certainly not completely, and

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second, we expect that people will have their vices. We also expect the possessor of these virtues to have actively exhibited them over a sufficient period of time, leading up to the present judgement. Of course, we can say of someone that he or she had been a person of integrity, meaning that person has fallen by the wayside. This emphasizes the point that a judgement as to integrity is not one given lightly but only after an historical survey. So, to say that someone is a person of integrity is to say that he or she has sufficient virtues in sufficient measure to outweigh any vices he or she may have and that this person had these virtues over a significant period of time. This person has a particular character. It is, like the ecosystem, an historical estimation of overall worth and non-corruption. It is clear that this argument makes the assumption that a thoroughly wicked person who possesses the vices in abundance and correspondingly very few virtues cannot be a person of integrity. The thoroughly wicked are certainly internally consistent in character but, in common parlance, the term integrity would not be used of them. Integrity is a value term. This fits with the remarks on the ecosystem. Alien factors affecting the character of a person may be both internal and external. Those alien factors that are internal are inconsistent with the virtuous traits the person possesses. Typically they are what we call vices. Those that are external are those that limit or damage the possession and exercise of the virtues. We use the term ‘integrity’ with respect to the general life and character of people, and in doing so we are referring to their general social dealings with their fellow human beings and also to their history. We also commonly use it with respect to their work. Newton was a scientist of integrity although he had some remarkable failings in other areas. A. J. P. Taylor was an historian of integrity, and this can be said without reference to the rest of his life. George Macdonald Fraser was an historical novelist of integrity, and this can be said without reference to his war record or social life in the north of England. This usage of the term is consistent with its use in general. Certain virtues are judged important to the profession of historian, historical novelist or scientist. The list can be continued with reference to other areas of work. What that list is may be a matter for debate. What is not a matter for debate, if the usage of the term is to be consistent, is that the judgement that this person is an historian of integrity does not name the perfect historian, possessor of all the necessary virtues in full degree. It does name a person who has a sufficient preponderance of the necessary virtues and a limited number of vices. It is an estimation. Can it be, then, that the historian of integrity may be not a person of integrity or vice versa? And what are the necessary virtues? Newton, Taylor and Macdonald Fraser are not judged persons of integrity in their fields on the basis of a single instance but on the basis of the history of their deeds. To act justly on one occasion is admirable, but for that virtue to qualify its possessor in the integrity stakes, a person must consistently be just over a lengthy period leading up to the present estimation. The narrative of a person’s life is a necessary point of reference when

The Concept of Integrity 3 judging whether or not a person is a person of integrity. The personal history of the historian qua historian is important. It appears from this initial discussion that the term ‘integrity’ is not a term that picks out a particular virtue, although it appears to be a virtue term. It more resembles a concept that picks out a range of virtues. Others have come to much the same view: There is, however, no philosophical consensus on the best account. It may be that the concept of integrity is a cluster concept, tying together different overlapping qualities of character under the one term. In Cox, La Caze and Levine 2003, we argue that integrity is a virtue, but not one that is reducible to the workings of a single moral capacity (in the way that, say, courage is) or the wholehearted pursuit of an identifiable moral end (in the way that, say, benevolence is). We take ‘integrity’ to be a complex and thick virtue term. (Cox 2008) As may be evident, I am inclined to agree. This needs further examination, and in that examination may be a clue to the historian or historical novelist of integrity. Bearing in mind that historians are a social group, as are historical novelists, let us consider something of the nature of a social group. The argument that follows owes a great deal to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. An example of a social group occurs in a village or town in which mining is the main industry that sustains the town. Mining is a complex activity in which the miners depend upon each other for the success of their work and for their lives. Above ground the families of the miners depend upon them and the town as a whole depends upon the mines and their product. The dependence is never one way; it is interdependence, a network of dependence. Criteria are developed from the proper exercise of all the interdependent parts of the society. Upon adherence to and continued development of these criteria hinges the ability of that society to achieve a sustained and worthwhile existence. This is not to say that it is a static existence but one that develops as circumstances demand and knowledge increases. A narrative develops. There is the pursuit of better practice. This pursuit is for the internal welfare of the society and its members and not simply for rewards external to it. The sustenance of the society and its continued welfare demand that certain criteria apply for the operation of the society and its individual elements. First and foremost among the elements that are necessary for the sustenance and development of the society is the recognition of mutual dependence. The notion of society contains, necessarily, the notion of interdependence. All members of the society are to some extent interdependent, some more than others, some less. The person who refuses to recognize that interdependence is a parasite with all that that epithet implies. The person who does not realize the necessity of interdependence is a defective member of the society, and their ignorance may damage the society. The person who rejects interdependence is a danger to that society. In the same way we may

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say that the members of a family, for the sustenance and the flourishing of that family, must recognize the mutual interdependence of the members of the family. The young children of the family are dependent on the older members, and eventually, the older on the younger. Many human societies have recognized this by acknowledging that the young incur a debt, which is to be met by their care for the elderly. Society therefore has been seen as a network of dependence in which there is debt and obligation. This is not a novel idea; witness the Confucian view of the matter. Societies are sustained and develop to the extent that they develop and improve a network of interdependence. To assert this is to attack the notion that society is made up of self-interested individuals. If the network is damaged or fractured, society suffers, and in the extreme case it is destroyed. What are the necessary conditions for the sustenance and development of interdependence? Some members of the society are more dependent than others, necessarily so. The very young, the physically damaged, and the vulnerable are all more dependent than most. At the other end of the spectrum there are those who are less dependent. The notion of interdependence has been expressed by MacIntyre as the virtue of acknowledged dependence (1999). It is a virtue of giving and receiving and has been expressed as giving from each according to his or her ability and to each according to his or her need insofar as this is possible. This notion contains within it a notion of the debt that each member of the society owes to others in that society. To this MacIntyre adds the notion of generosity, giving that goes beyond that which is required by justice. With these virtues we recognize mutual interdependence and the recognition of the worth of each individual and each group. They are the essential virtues for the sustenance and continued welfare of a society, whether it be as small as a family or as large as a nation-state. Deciding what needs to be done and acting cannot be properly carried out without foresight and careful judgement. Such judgement demands that those judging are capable of standing back from their beliefs, decisions and actions in the past and present and viewing them with a reflective eye. With that reflective eye, they must evaluate. Crucial to the process is imagination, for the past must be imagined, instant accurate detailed recall is not possible, and the future must be imagined. Deciding what it is best to do is the question that faces society and the individual. To put it another way— what is it prudent to do? And so another essential virtue has been named. In the making of decisions about the level and extent of need and ability and the consequent demands, difficult decisions will have to be made, and there has to be a determination to carry through those decisions. The matter is not simply an intellectual exercise. Moral courage is required at the individual level and the social level. Another necessary virtue, fortitude, has been named. Clearly one cannot leave it at that. There are a number of virtues, all of which have their work to perform: compassion, honesty and benevolence, for instance. Comte-Sponville gives a wise account of some seventeen of

The Concept of Integrity 5 them (2003). Virtues are produced and cultivated by a society in the attempt to realize that which is best in that society and to provide sustained, worthwhile growth. Virtues are excellences to be sought, to be learned and to be applied. They are essential if the society is to flourish. They are taught to the children of a society by word and deed, by aphorism and by proverb, in the hope that the children will become imbued with certain traits of character so that both they and society will flourish. The network of developed and developing interdependence can only be sustained by the exercise of virtues. There has to be a minimum level of acknowledged possession and exercise of the virtues such as justice, prudence and fortitude and avoidance of partiality, rashness, moral weakness and the like. As is evident I do not mean to assert that these are the only virtues involved, but they are among those that are necessary conditions for the sustenance of any practice. In linking the sustenance of a society with the possession and exercise of the virtues, I am arguing the case for what is meant by an integrated society, or to put it another way, for a society with integrity. This is not an argument about moral theory but simply a statement as to the necessary conditions for the existence of a society and its continued sustenance and flourishing. That is what such a society is as a matter of fact. It is now evident that the concept of integrity is indeed a concept that covers a variety of virtues and that when we talk of a society or an individual having integrity, then we are referring to the possession of those virtues necessary for that society or individual to sustain a worthwhile existence, to flourish. The study of history is the initiation into the practice of a discipline that has existed for centuries. MacIntyre has defi ned a practice as: any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially defi nitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (1981: 187) A MacIntyrean practice is a socially established, cooperative human activity. One must distinguish the activity of a group from that of a practice. A group activity may be made up on the spot as a cooperative activity that does not occur elsewhere in society and, within this group, does not again or occurs rarely. It is not socially established. People may come together and, as a group, go to the cinema. In doing so they may exhibit cooperative action. They meet, see the film, have a coffee and go their separate ways. Contrast this with the group that meets regularly to discuss a book that has been chosen some time before. The book club is socially established and it is a cooperative activity. One element that starts to differentiate it from the group that goes to the cinema lies in the discussion and the terms laid down for that discussion. That

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is, the book club starts to take on the features of a practice when the group starts to define the activity and produce criteria by which the worth of that activity is measured. There are goods internal to the activity, and it is for the realization of those goods and their development that the activity takes place. That there may be goods and goals extraneous to the activity is not a problem provided that they are not destructive of the internal goals and goods. When and if they are, then the activity will start to break down and the book club to disintegrate. Note the final word. The book club also has a narrative. It starts and develops a history. It also becomes an instance of a club that has been and is commonplace in a number of societies. The idea of meeting regularly to discuss the books that have been read by the group is not a new idea but is an activity that has developed and changed over the course of time, and members of a present group may be aware of this. They may be aware of the discussions that took place in the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century England or the more formal workers’ educational institutions of the next century. Book clubs have a narrative. And in reflecting on that narrative one may conclude that the workers’ educational institutions so changed the criteria that they became distinct from the book clubs. In the same fashion, if you change the rules of chess, you have a different game. Book clubs are part of a larger narrative, that of literary appreciation and criticism. As a small social group, a book club exhibits the characteristics and the needs of any society. They are a socially established group. What has been said about the acknowledgment of interdependence applies. As a result, if the book club is to flourish, then there must be a level of acceptance and active possession of the virtues. What is true of a simple example like a book club is true of more complex activities such as mining, and is also true of the practices of those intellectual activities which humanity has developed. It is true of science, of history, of literature, of music, of the graphic arts and many more. Our concern is with history and the use of historical research. Historians are practitioners in a socially established, complex activity. They are an established social group that can be analysed in the same manner that the mining community was analysed or indeed any social group may be analysed. The society that is historians is made up of a body of people with a variety of interests quite often defined in terms of periods of time but most certainly defined by their view of the world. However, if the society is to be sustained and flourish, then it must acknowledge the interdependence of its members. As with the societies discussed previously, there will be those who are less dependent and those who are more so. First-year university students studying history are dependent on the work and research of those teaching them and on the libraries of written research and exposition. They are in much the same position of young children in society. The senior figures in the society that is history are less dependent perhaps but still dependent on the conversation that is history to which they contribute. Without acknowledged interdependence, the study of history would atrophy. Those who make use of historical research, such as novelists, scriptwriters and dramatists, are clearly dependent upon it. It could be argued that historical novelists and others who use historical research

The Concept of Integrity 7 serve a useful and necessary function in the practice of history, that there is interdependence. Whether or not that argument can be sustained is not the concern of this chapter. There is no argument that those groups that practise by using the fruits of historical research have within themselves and often with each other the essential element of mutual interdependence. I have argued that a society in order to sustain itself and flourish must acknowledge interdependence and that this acknowledgement necessarily involves the development, possession and exercise of the virtues. The same is true of the society that is formed by the practice of history. We here have one account of what it is to be an historian of integrity and to use historical research with integrity. The historian of integrity is in active possession of those virtues which are necessary to the flourishing of the practice that is history. These virtues are no different to those demanded in a flourishing society. It is the same proposition for those who use the fruits of historical research. However, just as different circumstances demand the differential application of virtues, in this case a greater prudence, in that more fortitude, in this case more compassion, in that more generosity, so there is a differential application of the virtues by the practising historian. This is part of what is meant by an historian of integrity and the use of historical research with integrity. History has to be seen in the context of its narrative. Just as the scientist should be aware of the narrative that shows the changing scientific conception of the physical world, so the historian should be aware of the changing views of the world embodied in the work of past historians. The subject matter of history also has to be seen within the context of its narrative. To be initiated into the practice that is history is to be initiated into a practice that has a narrative and whose subject matter has a narrative. I shall concentrate on the narrative of the subject matter. History is a human activity. It cannot be ahistorical or asocial. George MacDonald Fraser reminds us: ‘You cannot, must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values if you are to have any inkling of it’ (2010). Certainly, you must see an incident, a person, a social group, a society in the past in its own terms, but he is wrong if by this he means that one fails to consider the narrative within which the incident, the person, the social group, the society sits. All historical work is a response to a problem that has both an intellectual and social history, and any attempted solution becomes a part of the narrative. In this way all historical work is adding to and, at times, reconstructing the narrative of the discipline. It was important when I characterized the concept of a practice to notice that practices always have histories and that at any given moment what a practice is depends on a mode of understanding it which has been transmitted often through many generations. (MacIntyre 1981: 221) The particular point that one must walk in another’s shoes whether in the present or the past if one is to understand becomes very clear when

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one considers the following. Through a telescope, you observe a couple of strangers seated on the balcony of a sixth-floor apartment block that overlooks a lake. One of the strangers raises a glass fi lled with a red liquid, pauses momentarily, speaks, and then drinks from the glass. You notice a wine bottle on the table by the strangers. You surmise that the stranger is drinking red wine. What you have seen might be described as an act of self-indulgence, an expression of politeness, a proof of alcoholism, a manifestation of loyalty, a gesture of despair, an attempt at suicide, the performance of a social rite, a religious communication, an attempt to summon up one’s courage, an attempt to seduce or corrupt another person, the sealing of a bargain, a display of professional expertise. (Ayer 1964: 7) To assert any of those descriptions requires more information. You might search the features and body language of the couple of the balcony: Do they look sad, happy, contemplative? You might examine their clothes: Are they informal, formal, expensive, foreign? Your search is for clues that may give you some basis for describing what is happening. You do not have the essential clue; that clue resides with the actor. The point being that the stranger is the fi nal authority on what he or she is doing. How he or she sees his or her behaviour is what makes the action the action that it is. The mechanics are the same; the action differs. In the same way, measurement of human behaviour may capture the mechanics of the circumstance but miss the humanity of the behaviour. If we are told by the stranger that it is one of the possibilities mentioned by Ayer, then we need to know more if we are to understand it fully. The actions of a person or persons in the historical past may be described in mechanistic terms, but an historian seeks the motives behind what has occurred. What were the motives from which the sons of Henry II of England rebelled against their father? We need to know how it appears at this moment in the life of that person in that society. The society in which a person lives serves as the setting for his or her life. It consists of institutions, norms, practices, language and all the myriad items that make and eventually distinguish one society from another. And they exist within a narrative. The historian must seek to describe and understand these. It is against this background that we are able to understand the actions of a person. And it is against such a background that the historian will argue that Socrates deliberately drinking a poisoned cup is understood in a different setting and therefore differently from someone quaffing wine at a barbecue. The actions may look the same or very similar, but the settings and the intentions of the drinkers are different, and the actions cannot be understood for what they are apart from the setting and intentions of the actor. This is why on occasion we ask, what do you think you are doing? Or of a fellow spectator, what is he thinking of? The point being that no understanding of human action can be ahistorical or asocial. Moreover, for the individual, no response to or consideration

The Concept of Integrity 9 of the question ‘What am I to do?’ can be ahistorical or asocial. All our actions and decisions are necessarily seen by us in the context of our existence, in the context of what MacIntyre calls the narrative of our lives. In a society, we learn the narrative so that it becomes possible to understand the behaviour of other persons in that society without continuous recourse to questioning. Only when our understanding fails are we puzzled and have recourse to questions. The death of Socrates is to be understood against the narrative of his life, and his friends had to be reminded of this. They understood his action by reference to the norms of the society in which they lived, the norms that enable behaviour to be understood and predicted. Therefore when they referred Socrates to these norms, they had failed to understand the action because they had failed to refer that action to the narrative of the man. In the case of Socrates, the narrative of his life had been at odds in many ways with the narrative of the society in which he lived. The question of what Socrates should do is answered by considering who he was. The question of what I am to do is a question answered by considering who I am. If that is true of us, then it is also true of those who would attempt to understand what we do and who we are. It is true for those who attempt to produce a history of the narrative. The historian has to grasp the narrative of the lives of those whom he or she seeks to give an account. What is true of the attempt to understand the individual is also true of the actions of societies and nations. The English viewing the events of 1776 in North America could see the events and, in a sense, describe them. They did not necessarily understand them nor the causes that led to them as we would understand them. If there is to be an understanding, then, the events of 1776 must be placed in the context of the narrative. To understand the actions of the English it is necessary to place these actions in the context of the narrative of the English and the stage of the narrative they had reached in 1776. Trying to do this from the viewpoint of an historian in 1850 results in a theory current for 1850, which might be developed or changed by an historian in 1950. The attempt is the same, the understanding of the actions in the historical past by grasping the narrative of the actors in that historical past. Those actors cannot be seen isolated from their narrative. In this respect the historian is no different from the scientist, for the scientist too works within a narrative and that which is produced is the best current theory. The theory, like all theories, contains within it the seeds of its own problems and the impetus for change. Newton reacted to Galileo, Einstein to Newton. The narrative both constitutes and is constitutive of its own development. History, science, literature, music are human activities and, in order to understand the work of people in these areas and what is produced, it must be seen in its historical context. Their narrative must be understood. The revolutions in scientific thought are the places in which the narrative is rewritten as it is in the change from Bach to Mozart, from Fielding to Austen. The narrative enables the practitioner to see where the past was and where the future might lie (MacIntyre 1977). To understand the work of Einstein it is

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necessary to see it as tackling the problems inherent in the work of Newton, which in turn had been built on the work of Galileo. In a very real sense, all human intellectual activity whether considered as the actions of an individual in his or her everyday life or considered on the larger scale of history, science, literature, music or the graphic arts cannot be understood without a grasp of the narrative. In science, history and other intellectual activities that seek to explain, describe or give an account, the narrative is at once a chronicle of the development of the activity and a statement of the best current account. So, Newtonian mechanics was the best current account of its subject matter at the time of its publication. It might be argued that Woodham-Smith’s account of the Great Hunger was the best current account at the time of its publication in 1964 and, in the same way that Newtonian mechanics superceded Galilean mechanics, it superceded previous accounts. This notion extends to a society, and historians form a society. For a society to exist and continue to exist it must be possible for the members of that society to give an intelligible account of their own actions and those of others on sufficient occasions. Without accountability and predictability society descends into confusion, for everything becomes unpredictable and unintelligible. For society to sufficiently cohere, for its existence to continue without stagnation, it must be possible for the members of that society to predict with sufficient confidence a large range of actions of the members of that society. There is more than this. In giving an intelligible account of its actions, a society is giving an account of its existence and its view of that existence. Clearly societies differ in their view of the world and their existence. Can one compare societies? This involves making judgements about their relationship to the world of their existence. Can this be done? Clearly one may do this, but can such a comparison have any validity? Many have argued that all one can do is describe. However, it is possible to validly argue that a society is the best current exemplar of a human society at the present time. Which is not to say that it cannot be improved. This is implicit in our historical criticisms of past societies. Consider a society, A. In making a judgement of society A we have the possibility of two arguments. The first is to argue that on A’s own criteria it is not a flourishing society. The second is to argue that, on a different set of criteria, A is not the best example of a society and will not flourish as well as a society built on the different criteria. In running this argument one has to show that the society formed under the new and different criteria answers all the demands that society A met and solves some of the problems or issues that beset society A. This is an argument by which one can say one society is better than another. It is not saying that it is the best but simply the best that we have come up with so far and that it could well change in the future. Note that the narrative is not linear and there may be mistakes and regression. There have been blind alleys in science as there are in any intellectual endeavour, there have been mistakes in societies and there will be in the future. None of this is surprising for it is simply what is meant by being reasonable and for an endeavour to attempt to flourish. To the extent that any society coexists with others, then, the same dictum applies to a grasp of

The Concept of Integrity 11 the actions of another society although the range of predictable actions will be different. One must understand the criteria upon which the other society is founded. Where they are so different that societies misunderstand each other, coexistence is threatened. Societies, like individuals, do not exist in social and historical vacuums. An intelligible account depends upon a grasp of the narrative. This is true of human life and is true of human practices for the concept of narrative applies both to the enquiry and the enquirer. Understanding the practice that is history is a matter of grasping the current mode of understanding and seeing it in the context of a developing narrative. The failure to do so damages the integrity of what is produced. Its reference point is lost. Integrity is involved in the grasp of the narrative both in history as such and in historical research. Without that grasp, one cannot do justice to the past. The narrative shows the development of a practice as it seeks to realize its socially cooperative nature and seeks to better develop and realize the internal goods of the practice. Being initiated into the practice that is history is a matter of learning, possessing and exercising those virtues that are essential for the existence, sustenance and flourishing of the practice. Both the practice and practitioner benefit from such possession and exercise. The virtues are traits of character, and the person of integrity who acts with integrity is exercising traits of character that he or she possesses. However, it is clear that in the active possession of the virtues, particular virtues are not all applied to the same extent. Complete honesty may clash with prudence, justice with compassion, benevolence with fortitude and so on. If in the interests of prudence and compassion one limits the honesty of an act, is this to make it impossible to act with integrity? If this were so, then it could well be argued that no act can ever be one of integrity and no person can ever be a person of integrity. Such an argument ignores the fact that we all balance the virtues. This balance is to be expected for no human act is simple. It has been a mistake for too long to regard the individual virtues as something that can be analysed and thought about in isolation. For instance, to think about and discuss the virtue of justice and attempt to come to some account of that virtue without examining the way in which it interacts with other virtues on all occasions is a mistake. All accounts of giving and receiving, of need and ability cannot be simply accounts of the virtue of justice; they must also be accounts of how justice interacts with other virtues such as compassion, tolerance, honesty, fortitude, generosity, mercy and humility. To act with integrity is to balance the input of the virtues with reference to the particular occasion. We have another word for this balancing act—wisdom. While modernity, at least Western modernity, has taken a rather jaundiced view of wisdom, seeing the classic quest after its meaning as a kind of fool’s errand, best left to those in the business of compiling almanacs and penning messages for fortune cookies, quite the opposite was true during the centuries immediately preceding the emergence of psychology as an independent discipline, an extended period during

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Tony Gibbons which the study of wisdom was widely understood as the primary task of philosophers and an intellectual obligation upon all thoughtful persons. (Chandler and Holliday 1990: 125)

The intellectual obligation upon all thoughtful persons is to seek a balance. He or she may not achieve it, for we are human and fallible. In seeking that balance, however, they are seeking the best possible decision at a particular time in particular circumstances. Such was the wisdom ascribed to Solomon. The person of integrity seeks that balance of the virtues. The wise decision is the decision of integrity. The wise person is the person of integrity. This appellation does not depend upon success, although constant failure would give rise to doubt about the integrity of a person or some acts. The integrity of a person depends upon his or her active possession of the virtues and seeking the wise balance in the activity of these virtues. The act of integrity is arguably the best possible act at that time. It is always possible to argue that it is not. There is nothing in this that suggests the matter is subjective. One does not suggest that science is subjective when one criticizes a theory or when Einstein changes our view of the world. Rationality demands that we produce the best current decision or theory at the time, and it is no more or less than that. The fact that we cannot produce knowledge is not damning but simply a matter of rational thought and attempted progress. Integrity is indeed an umbrella term in the sense that it encompasses all the virtues. It is also a balancing term. Other chapters in this book use words like ‘negotiation’ when talking of integrity. It is that too. It is a matter of negotiation between the virtues and in coming to a decision as to how best to balance the weight accorded to each applicable virtue in a given instance. it is a matter of practical reason—a matter of wisdom.

REFERENCES Ayer, A. J. 1964. Man As a Subject for Science. London: Athlone. Chandler, M. J., and Holliday, S. 1990. ‘Wisdom in a Postapocalyptic Age,’ in Wisdom, Its Nature, Origins and Development, edited by R. J. Sternberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comte-Sponville, A. 2003. A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues, translated by C. Temerson. London: Vintage. Cox, D., M. La Caze and M. Levine. 2008. ‘Integrity,’ edited by E. N. Zalta. Stanford University: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/integrity/ (accessed 5 January 2011). MacDonald Fraser, G. 2010. Quartered Safe out Here. HarperCollins, ebooks. MacIntyre, A. 1977. ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science.’ Monist 60: 453–72. . 1981. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. . 1999. Dependent Rational Animals. Chicago: Open Court. Woodham-Smith, C. 1964. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849. New York: Signet.

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‘Who Would Want to Believe That, Except in the Service of the Bleakest Realism?’ Historical Fiction and Ethics Jerome de Groot ‘Every work of art is a charming lie; anyone who has written knows this well.’ —Stendahl

There has been some controversy recently about the relationship between fiction and history, with noted public historians claiming that fiction about the past ‘contaminates historical understanding’ (Sweeney 2010: 43). Similarly, James Forrester has recently argued that the ‘path a historical novelist has to tread is clearly beset by dangers,’ pointing out that filling in the historical gaps is invention: ‘Such invention could be called educated guesswork, but it is still guesswork, it is still lying’ (Forrester 2010). The greater profile the genre attains, the more it is bedevilled by discussions of ethics, authenticity, realism and truth. In many ways, the form itself provokes and holds within itself this kind of debate; from Scott onwards, historical novelists have been self-conscious about their projects and the particular historiographical and fictional rules they play by. Historical novels happily point out that they are lying to the reader, disavowing their own versions of reality while cleaving to conventions of authenticity. Jonathan Nield, writing about the form in 1902, made some acute observations: But, goes on the objector, in the case of a Historical Romance we allow ourselves to be hoodwinked, for, under the influence of a pseudohistoric security, we seem to watch the real sequence of events in so far as these affect the characters in whom we are interested. (1902: n.p.) This chapter considers Nield’s idea of being ‘hoodwinked,’ of being conned and lied to but, crucially, with the audience somehow being participants who willingly allow this to be the case. In particular, the chapter considers how historical novels lie to their readers and how they reconcile that with the intention to represent some kind of truth or authenticity of experience.

14 Jerome de Groot This chapter, then, considers the ethical investments and moral aesthetics inherent in writing in fictional guise about the past. It fi rst considers the attitudes of writers to their craft, demonstrating the very real and live decision-making process at work in all novelistic approaches to the past. A case study considering several children’s writers raises various key issues and also demonstrates that, in at least one area of fictional endeavour, considering the impact of writing upon the imagination of the reader is keenly important. This section demonstrates that consideration of the material conditions of publication—pitching, editing and negotiating a book—can give keen insight into the process of composition and the issues at stake in representing the past in fiction. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2002). This novel features an extraordinary conclusion in which the narrator essentially admits to fictionalizing the history that she has presented as an act attempting to atone for a past lie. Briony, the narrator, is an historical novelist, and McEwan clearly dramatizes the ethical decisions made by such a writer in representing the past—the need to navigate a line between authenticity and emotional truth, the historical novelist’s unique ability to write ‘truth’ that is clearly, and self-consciously, untrue. The metafictional and paratextual come together in this grey area, which constitutes a profound but rarely seen comment upon the novelist’s practice. When questioned about ethics, authenticity and their duty to history, writers of historical fiction demonstrate a range of response and diversity of opinion. Sarah Waters argues: I don’t think novels should misrepresent history, unless it’s for some obvious serious or playful purpose (though this suggests that we can represent history accurately—something I’m not sure we can do; in fact, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which historical fiction continually reinvents the past). I think we have a duty to take history seriously—not simply to use it as a backdrop or for the purposes of nostalgia. This, for me, means writing a fiction with, hopefully, something meaningful to say about the social and cultural forces at work in the period I’m writing about. (2006: n.p.) Waters here makes several key assertions. First, like most of her peers, she seeks to not misrepresent. This implies that history itself—the set of ideas, sources, evidence and narratives we have that ‘tell’ the past—is not already a misrepresentation. With that said, she acutely points to the fact that the disconnect inherent to fiction—that novelists can’t ‘represent history accurately’—creates a space for reinvention. Her points about nostalgia and the seriousness of the craft of historical fiction demonstrate a clear engagement and a politicized desire to lay bare the workings of the past. She demonstrates a concern that historical fiction has purpose and political heft. In Waters’s view, historical novelists have a very active duty

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to history, but similarly, they have a political and moral duty to the present, through the choices they make in representing the past. This impetus to represent the past as dynamic and affective while eschewing nostalgia argues an understanding of the historical novelist’s project as something that has virtue and value and, most important, ethical significance. Questions about accuracy particularly generate a great deal of anxiety among historical novelists—but at the same time, it is clear the majority of them have thought about the issues and have each made their own particular position clear enough. In particular, consideration of the ethical issues of fictionally representing the past invokes questions of authenticity, appropriateness and the ways in which the reader either knowingly interrogates the historical novel or should not be ‘hoodwinked.’ Lynne Connolly argues that she wishes to eschew the contemporary: ‘I want to present the past without the distortion of modern viewpoints, although that can be difficult sometimes’ (2009). Alan Fisk similarly outlines an artistic ethic that attempts to disavow the present: ‘the ethical obligation to represent the attitudes of a period and place as the people of that time saw them, and not to distort them to correspond to the political correctness of the author’s time and place’ (Fisk 2009). This sense of the historical novel being outside of contemporary historical, cultural or social bias argues for a connection between reader and text and historical event that is almost transcendent. Many writers are conscious of having an educational remit: ‘I feel I owe it to my readers to be as accurate as possible about the facts in my story. Like it or not, many readers of historical novels LEARN about history from those novels. It would be irresponsible of me, knowing that, to teach them false history’ (Singwiththespirit 2009). This sense of the keen importance of the novel in constructing an image and a cultural version of the past, as well as the pedagogical aspects of historical fiction, pervades much authorial comment. Writers have a keen sense of their responsibility to their readership as much as to the past: ‘Historical novelists only have a duty to let their readers know how their work relates to history, in a “Writer’s Note” or a Preface’ (Field 2009). Furthermore, this is necessary because of the close and trusting relationship between author and reader: ‘Readers expect the writer to transport them to an exotic time and place in the past, and will trust the writer to offer a setting as close as possible to reality’ (Field 2009). As Susan Hicks points out, any situation might be written about, but ‘the way one tackles them has to be deeply considered and it is one of the challenges (which I enjoy) of being a writer of historical fiction. How do you stay true to a time with different views and keep the modern reader on board. Enormously rewarding to fi nd a way to write the connection’ (2009). Her sense of creating a connection between the difference of the othered past and the attitudes and concerns of the contemporary reader intersect with a sense of duty to those that are being written about. As Hicks continues, ‘The dead as much as the living are owed integrity’ (2009).

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These questions of the ethical approach of historical novelists to their subject matter comes into unique and particular focus when considering books written for children. In this case the question of authenticity clashes with the issue of appropriateness. This is clearly the case in children’s writing more generally, as is seen by the controversy generated by Berlie Doherty’s Dear Nobody (1991, about teenage pregnancy), or Melvin Burgess’s Junk (1996, about heroin addiction) and Lady: My Life as a Bitch (2001, about sexual behaviour), all of which generated much debate due to appropriateness issues. Yet children’s historical fiction allows an insight in microcosm into the issues—material, economic, aesthetic and ethical—that confront writers when they make certain decisions about their representation of the past. Children’s fiction also brings into clear focus the question of audience because the novels are written for very specific readerships, and there is a clear assumption—on the part of the publisher, at least—of the possible action and agency on that constituency. Robert Westall’s classic novel The Machine-Gunners (1975) is set in northeast England during the 1940s. From the time of its publication the novel attracted some controversy due to its illustrations of violence and its bad language. Writing to Westall about the swearing in the text, Kaye Webb of Penguin mused, ‘I now find we are due for an urgent reprint, and I wondered if, in the interests of extra sales, you might feel it worth while doing a bit of expurgating’ (1978: fol. 1r). The problem, she outlines, is that direct sales of the book into schools via the Puffi n School Bookclubs ‘“sight unseen”, so to speak’ has meant that teachers are having to deal with complaints from parents (1978: fol. 1r). There is no record of Westall’s response to this letter, but he quite carefully outlines his position about the swearing—and the violence—of the book in various articles and letters, mainly pointing out that it is quite consistent with the historical record, and states: ‘Surely my whole theme is that violence does not pay?’ (Westall 1977: fol. 1r). More problematic, Westall was often moved to counter criticism that his work was racist. In a 1985 correspondence with a class of schoolchildren who had taken him to task for a perceived racist comment in The MachineGunners, he argued: ‘The Machine-Gunners’ is a historical novel, written in 1973 about the way things were in 1940. In those days, everybody in Britain except a very enlightened few in the universities was racist and sexist and didn’t even know it—the terms hadn’t been invented, the concept hadn’t been formed. (Westall 1988: fol. 1r) Westall takes refuge in history here, side-stepping the ways in which historical reality intersect with contemporary identity politics and defi nition—although after a similar correspondence a few years later, he asked for the phrase to be taken out of subsequent editions.1 In an earlier series of

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manuscript essays Westall tries to articulate his position about race and the ways in which he should address it within historical fiction. His account of the problems and vagaries he sees in discourse about race and, to a much lesser extent, sexism, leads him at times to express outrage at censorship and to attack what would become known as political correctness; he claims the ‘truth’ irrespective of the concerns of ‘Social Critics.’ Westall’s accounts of various encounters with a range of ethnic minorities seek to interrogate what he sees as craven and unthinking complicity—including his own: ‘Crawlingly and contemptibly, though unconsciously, I tried. The amount of swearing in my books dropped; the intellectual content, the scholarship and research grew’ (Westall n.d.a: fol. 6r). For all that his thoughts are aggressive and somewhat problematic, he concludes with a plea that articulates the complexity that children’s literature might attend to: ‘Isn’t the truth that racial tolerance can only be fought for within the individual human heart? That is the only meaningful battlefield. And if children’s literature is to move effectively into this field, it has to move in with stories of the fallible, wicked human heart’ (Westall n.d.b: fol. 20r). As he argues elsewhere, reality is problematic itself and should not be romanticized: ‘Nostalgia is the enemy of children’s realism’ (Westall n.d.b.: fol. 3r). For Westall, the past is chaotic and horrible, and it should be presented as such to obviate a slide into numbing nostalgia that helps no one; like Waters, Westall considers the authentic representation of the past to be key in articulating change in the contemporary. Like Westall, the novelist Geoffrey Trease spent much time railing against what he saw as ‘creeping censorship inspired by timidity’ (Trease 1988: fol.). Trease often complained about the ‘bogey’ of pressure groups on children’s fiction scouting for sexist or racist remarks (1996: 138). Two incidents particularly rankled and were the basis for his attacks on literary censorship in his later reflections on his career. These moments, much like Westall’s complaints, again give unprecedented insight into the ways in which novelists conceptualize their relationship to the past and, particularly, how they conceive of, and see themselves as conduits to, their readership’s understanding of that past. On 17 June 1971, Linda M. Jennings of Hamish Hamilton wrote to Trease about his manuscript ‘The Chocolate Boy.’ Trease’s copy of the letter has his handwritten note: ‘Later this book was published by Heinemann, and later in a Pan Piccolo paperback collection—no adverse reaction was ever reported to me’ (Jennings 1971: ms. note). He repeats this assertion in his various later accounts of the correspondence. Jennings’s letter outlines the particular moral quandaries and ethical discomfort the publisher felt due to the subject matter of the typescript: We have found over the last few years in this country, and to an even greater degree in America, that the whole question of colour has become a very delicate one indeed. The old ‘Uncle Tom’ image is being rejected

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Jerome de Groot by young coloured readers, who want to forget their past history of subservience and be treated as normal, free human beings. In this climate, therefore, we do feel it would be a great mistake to publish THE CHOCOLATE BOY, where this subservient attitude is all too prevalent. Of course, I realise that what you are saying is that Sam should be treated as a normal human being, but the whole strata of 18th Century society gives rise to the most awful-sounding patronage, even from so gentle a child as Sarah. (1971: fol. 1r)

Leaving aside the problematic vocabulary of ‘subservience,’ the letter clearly demonstrates the importance to the publisher of considering the ways in which the readership would engage with and conceptualize the text. The fi nal lines, suggesting that the entire century participates in a racism that should be simply ignored because it is unavoidable illustrates the attitude of the publisher as desiring to avoid controversy. Trease points out the obvious moral and historical relativism that this raises: Is it better to forget bad things or to confront them? It is also clear that the nervousness of the publisher is about perception rather than actuality. He argues for the centrality of historical accuracy and truth irrespective of how it might be read in contemporary society: ‘How could I give a full and truthful picture of the period if I cut out features that might offend an immigrant child in our own century?’ (Trease 1996: 137). A letter from 1988 to Trease from Lynett Wilson, fiction editor at Macmillan Children’s Books, about his novel A Flight of Angels points out again the increasing importance of the library in censorious approaches to fiction: ‘As I am sure you know, librarians nowadays are very much on the alert for writing for children that contains anything that might appear sexist or racist’ (Wilson 1988: fol. 1r). This letter argues that Trease might highlight a more ‘positive role’ for one of the female characters. In his response he claims to be ‘gently satirising him [the main character] (the feminists ought to cheer) and showing how Sheila’s subtle handling of him secures her desired objective’ (Trease 1988: fol. 1r). Rather than an address to history, Trease simply claims he is demonstrating in the fabric of his novel—rather than the explicit content—strategies for countermanding sexism and overbearing maleness. At times Trease and Westall sound somewhat reactionary, railing against a new way of thinking. Trease actually argues, ‘I do feel strongly about the integrity of the author’s text. Having worn the Macmillan imprint now for over forty years this dog does not take kindly to learning new tricks’ (Trease 1988: fol. 2r). Yet their sharp responses to those who would accuse them of sexism, racism, and the glorification of violence and bad language demonstrates their desire to both situate themselves outside a ‘children’s writer’ taxonomy and also to cleave to a model of authenticity. The truth is grisly and uncomfortable, particularly for a modern reader, and that, in many ways, is the point:

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What is the best thing to do about this? The thing to remember is that ‘The Machine-Gunners’ is a truthful record—a historical record—of how things were then. To change it, in the direction of anti-racism or anti-sexism, would be to make it into a lie, to mislead people in the future. I do not think it is possible to build a worthwhile future on the basis of a lying past. (Westall 1988: fol. 1r) Similarly, Leon Garfield attacked ‘moral’ censorship: ‘For, if you censor a book on account of your own moral feelings, is it not possible that you are merely writing your own inhibitions on the next generation?’ (Garfield [1970?]: fol. 92v). It is clear that publishers have some influence on what is deemed ‘appropriate’ in children’s fiction, and this feeds back to a discussion of the ethics of historical representation. The two key aspects of the argument are ‘what is appropriate for the reader’ and ‘what is appropriate for truth.’ Reading Trease and Westall in the archive is a relatively uncomfortable experience. Both display attitudes that themselves seem out of step with contemporary social discourse—so the ethics of the researcher are called into question in the ways in which they should be represented. However, they also mount spirited defences of the purity of the past and the duty the novelist has to represent it, warts, racism and all. They do, furthermore, see that representing the past authentically has a moral framework that will impinge upon their readership, but they feel that lying to that readership is much more ethically and aesthetically problematic. So the ethics of historical representation here are very much about authenticity and realism, and the quandaries of illustrating and repeating issues that seem out of line with contemporary attitude. The past is ungovernable, and why should we try? A fi nal example here is that of Joan Lingard, whose series of novels featuring teenagers Kevin McCoy (Catholic) and Sadie Jackson (Protestant) used their relationship to consider the situation in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her agents, A. M. Heath, reacted to the proposal for such a book with some trepidation: Your other idea, though interesting, does present certain difficulties because libraries and publishers may not be enthusiastic about a book on the Ulster situation bringing in the clash between Protestants and Catholics. Also by the time the book appears, the situation may be very much changed, we hope for the better. We do think that such a book would be a difficult proposition. (Leeston 1969: fol. 1r) Lingard clearly thought otherwise and approached Hamish Hamilton directly, who wrote a few days later: ‘I agree that the subject of religious intolerance in Belfast is a particularly hot one but I don’t see why we must pretend that it doesn’t exist, and perhaps a book for young readers could help them to understand more clearly the tremendously complex and

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distressing situation’ (MacRae 1969: fol. 1r). These exchanges demonstrate the two extreme positions: the one, that such books would not—should not?—be written, as they are dangerous, difficult and potentially problematic to an author’s sales and reputation; the other, that the exploration of the historical issues fundamental to the confl ict might bring resolution or, through education, clearer understanding. So far the question of ethics and representation has been discussed clearly within the locale of the author or the author-publisher, and it is important when considering historical fiction to remember the material conditions of composition and publication in order to regain a clearer sense of what is at stake when deploying certain ideas, modes or periods. This conceptualization is given further impetus when analysing Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, which itself dramatizes the relationship of historical authors to their texts in order to highlight many of the ethical, moral and aesthetic issues inherent in writing fiction about the past. Atonement (2001) is McEwan’s second historical novel, after The Innocent (1990). It is a very self-conscious intervention into the genre. The novel is stylistically indebted to a range of writers from Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen, and in its two sections it inhabits the classic locale of the later twentieth-century English fictive-historical tradition—the country house, and World War II (see De Groot 2008: 214–15). It is also a novel that is self-conscious enough to play games with the readers, and in doing so, it highlights some of the really problematic—but fundamental—issues accruing around historical fiction and the ethics of representing the past (see Cormack 2009). It also, more problematically, entered into these debates more obviously through the controversies associated with McEwan’s alleged plagiarism. McEwan was accused by various newspapers of borrowing too liberally from one of his source texts, Lucilla Andrews’s memoir from 1977, No Time for Romance, a book he acknowledged in his concluding historical note. McEwan, in a defence of his use of Andrews’s book, articulated a very austere line on authenticity and in doing so underlines a particular sense of the novelist’s duty to the past: The writer of a historical novel may resent his dependence on the written record, on memoirs and eyewitness accounts, in other words on other writers, but there is no escape: Dunkirk or a wartime hospital can be novelistically realised, but they cannot be re-invented. (2006) Everything is textual in McEwan’s version of the ways in which the past is written as fiction; the words of those who were there become the groundwork for the contemporary writer. The reaction to the accusations that McEwan should have made his debt to Andrews more explicit ranged from editorials defending the right of the historical novelist to use the work of others (‘That, I fi nd myself thinking, is what novelists do when they choose to take on historical subject matter: research is the name for this work’)

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to various letters from eminent writers around the world (Wagner 2006). Thomas Pynchon wrote to the Telegraph: Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the Internet until, with luck, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act—it is simply what we do. (reproduced in Reynolds 2006) What this case and these writers’ passionate interventions point out is that writing historical fiction is fundamentally different than writing contemporary fiction, and that there are numerous historiographical, ethical and aesthetic issues involved in the undertaking. Historical novels are judged in a different way too and read differently, directly because of the form’s invocation of these issues. The protagonist of Atonement claims that ‘no one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel,’ but she is evidently incorrect in her assumption (McEwan 2002: 371). Atonement takes place during the 1930s and 1940s and concerns the Tallis family, and in particular, the actions of the youngest daughter, Briony. In 1934, England is sweltering in the heat of a long, dry summer. Briony Tallis, a dreamy, bookish thirteen-year-old girl with a penchant for writing and acting in her own plays and psychodramas, sees her sister and Robbie Turner, son of the housekeeper, during a moment of sexual tension and through a series of errors becomes convinced that Robbie has raped her sister. Robbie, mainly on the malicious and false testimony of Briony, is convicted of sexual assault on another girl and imprisoned. He is released into the army, and he meets Briony again during the war when she seeks out her sister to apologize and attempt to make right what she has done. He is angry with her but tasks her to record in letter and oath her revised story. The revision of the record must be undertaken textually and legally. The letter that she will write will allow her forgiveness, as she calmly reflects: ‘She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin’ (McEwan 2002: 349). Her action of righting the wrongs of the past will allow her to reconcile herself to the present. Or rather, that is what she tells us. The novel then moves to a short coda in which it becomes clear that Briony is a novelist and the novel has been her own act of textual, fictional atonement. Not only is she a novelist, but she is also a writer of historical fiction. Briony visits the Imperial War Museum for the last time to say her farewells, as she has been writing a novel of the war. In fact, she has written her last novel, a revision of a drafted book she wrote in 1940 to outline what actually happened that night in 1935, revising it through her life but never able to fi nish or publish

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it for legal reasons: ‘I put it all there as a matter of historical record. But as a matter of legal reality, so various editors have told me over the years, my forensic memoir could never be published while my fellow criminals were alive’ (McEwan 2002: 370). She claims her work is ‘a matter of historical record,’ a document that—in its intersection with the law—has the status of a deposition. The law makes something false despite its ‘truth.’ The law here creates inaccuracy in the historical record—or rather, protects the lies that have been told—but it also articulates what the historical novelist is allowed to write about and what she is not. As Cormack argues: ‘If it is postmodern, it is not postmodernism of the playful celebratory type. At the end of the novel both Briony Tallis, our narrator, and we, her readers, are profoundly troubled by the uncertainties we face’ (2009: 76). In atoning for her sins—confessing in print—Briony also seeks to make things better for those whom she betrayed. Therefore, whereas the crime itself is truthfully represented—if that is possible with such a dissembling, problematic narrator—what follows is fiction. Rather than account for what actually happens to her sister and Robbie, she writes an account—the account that the reader has been just reading—rooted in historical accuracy but completely fantastical: All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. . . . That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? (McEwan 2002: 370–71) Briony’s comments here, although self-serving, bring up numerous ethical issues associated with historical fiction. She points out the movement of the historical novel to romance, towards reconciliation and conclusion; in effect, to order in the face of the fragmentary nature of knowledge about the past. In particular, the historical novelist fudges the actuality of death, substituting instead a comforting fiction that draws the sting of the past, disavows its trauma. In Briony’s formulation, the historical novelist imposes order upon the chaos of the past, turning horror into narrative. In doing so, one makes choices to change, manipulate or misrepresent, to a greater or lesser extent, while attempting to ground the account in reality. The dynamic here is awkward, to say the least; being able to reconcile this need to

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augment and sculpt the past in ways that it refuses to be directed with a commitment to representing that past somehow truthfully argues a fundamental dissonance at the heart of historical fiction. Every single historical novel is an ethical negotiation on the part of the author with these concerns, and each writer more or less acknowledges this. However, this negotiation and the very action of choosing how to represent the past, the values at stake in articulating that past and the continual knowledge that the past is never going to be fully, accurately realized—these are the concerns of the historian as much as the novelist, and the ethical struggles of historical fiction in representing the past in themselves articulate an historiographical verity. Briony dates her manuscript ‘London 1999,’ and the final section of the novel is dated ‘1999’; given the book’s publication in 2001, there is a minor doubling of historical narrative here, a similar effect to that of Birdsong (1993) which has sections from 1910 through 1918 and 1979. What seems to be the ‘contemporary’ or the ‘now’ of the novel is not, further warping the view of the reader. Briony’s testimony is already historical, past, and its effects—if it has any—are further neutralized by this fact. Interestingly, the coda itself is followed by McEwan’s own acknowledgements, which begin by thanking the Imperial War Museum and also recording his indebtedness to several books, notably No Time for Romance by Lucilla Andrews. The rawness of this—the moment of the fictional historical novelist concluding her fictional history, followed by the actual historical novelist—adds the compounding effect of the metatextual elements. More than most historical novels, this one presses the nose of the reader in its own artificiality, but in doing so it merely points out the fact that all historical fiction are tissues of lies that misrepresent and misappropriate. Briony has vascular dementia—a disorder affecting the memory: The little failures of memory that dog us all beyond a certain point will become more noticeable, more debilitating, until the time will come when I won’t notice them because I will have lost the ability to comprehend anything at all. (McEwan 2002: 354) Consciousness—life—is dependant on memory and the ability to keep it in place and order, to sustain its relationship to the present. Without this, Briony expects to become ‘just a dim old biddy in a chair, knowing nothing, expecting nothing’ (McEwan 2002: 354). Memory is everything in neurological terms—language, selfhood, and consciousness. Without it to create the dynamic then-now and to provide language the body is an empty shell with no purpose or agency. She will no longer be in history, but step outside it into meaninglessness, ‘fading into unknowing.’ (McEwan 2002: 355)

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The novel presents a challenge to two types of ‘official,’ textualized history—that of the archive (particularly, the physical repository of the Imperial War Museum library) and the story of national self-creation, that is, the war itself as remembered in the United Kingdom (and, particularly, the memorialization of the war rendered in novels and dramatic reenactments). 2 Briony’s atonement for her lies or misrepresentation is to lie further, and to turn from the shocking realist chaos of history to the comfort of fiction. Yet this rendering of narrative order onto horror simply leads to a moment in the text of rupture and further epistemic violence, insofar as the ordering structure of the text-reader relationship is broken. Briony’s admission that she makes things up—most important, the things that the reader has been reading— forces the reader to recognize the entire novel as a tissue of lies. Yet these are lies in the service of salving the conscience of the author—atoning for what she has done. Briony admits that she consciously changes the facts to make her interpretation, her preferred version of the ‘truth’—self-evidently not such—fit the storyline. Briony has been using the services of a witness to give authority to her writing. Her contact, a former soldier, corrects her language and her terminology: ‘I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction’ (McEwan 2002: 359). Briony’s language here is instructive—‘verisimilitude’ rather than realism or authenticity or truth—the representation of pastness is what she attains through this collage of fact. With that said, she later reflects: ‘If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book’ (McEwan 2002: 360). Many contemporary reviewers did not mention the shift at the conclusion of the novel, or they chose to play it down; for instance, Boyd Tonkin (the Independent), Geoff Dyer (the Guardian) and Tom Shone (New York Times) all pretty much ignore it while praising the novel’s ‘moral ambiguity’ (Dyer 2001). In fact, despite widespread coverage, none of the writers covering the plagiarism story mentioned this, either. The use of Cyril Connolly as a figure in the fi nal section, commenting on Briony’s work and other intertexts and echoes from Woolf to Leavis diverted many writers to consider the novel from a literary critical point of view, looking at its ability with characterization and tone and narrative. The impact of the fi nal sequence on the novel’s version of history was rarely considered. Yet this is exactly the location of its most problematic implications. Hermione Lee, writing in the Observer, considered the coda in some depth for its literary qualities, although—along with most commentators—she used this to reflect upon McEwan’s generic accomplishment: If fiction is a controlling play, a way of ordering the universe in which the writer is away in her—or his—thoughts, then is it a form of escapism, lacking all moral force? Is it just another form of false witness, and so always ‘unforgivable’? And are some forms of fiction—modernist, middle-class, limited to personal relations—more unforgivable than others? (2001)

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Lee asks some quite profound questions here but articulates them within an overarching disciplinary context. She is considering ‘forms of fiction,’ but to push her thoughts further, McEwan demonstrates not only how the novelist controls the chaos of the universe but, furthermore, how fiction in the present orders, disciplines and rewrites the fragmentations and traumas of history. What is ‘unforgivable’ about the novel is that it is not history, it cannot tell the truth—it is always bearing ‘false witness.’ What McEwan’s novel encapsulates, then, is this central truth of fiction, that it is a lie which sits at an awkward and morally problematic angle to history. All novels lie, but historical novels lie about facts, or at least events that we as a culture or society consider had an actuality and a ‘truth’ to them. If fiction is about lying—Lee’s ‘escapism’—then the historical novel with its apparatus and self-consciousness is at least more honest than most in presenting the reader with the tools of critique. Historical fiction in its notes and footnotes and afterwords and general paratextual commentary points to its own wraughtness, its own partiality as an account of the past. Historical fiction does not make a claim to completeness—while at the same time, through its emotive force, interactivity, dissembling and implication of the authentic fallacy, historical novels continually pull the wool over the eyes of the audience. To write historical fiction is to engage in an ethical mediation and demands an aesthetic and epistemological sophistication that is often missed by critics of the genre. This is recognized by Peter Middleton and Tim Woods: The distance between epistemology and ontology, or historical knowledge and literary fiction could be negotiated only by some kind of moral practice, although a morality of tradition or universalising precepts is insufficient for the textual conditions of late modernity. (2000: 78) Middleton and Woods, echoing J. Hillis Miller’s attempt at reconciling the ethical work of literature, argue that the line between fiction and fact demands an ethics of representation, albeit one that is corrupted or problematized by the conditions of postmodernity. Hilary Mantel considers that the process of writing about the past is actually one of moderating its horrors: ‘A relation of past events brings you up against events and mentalities that, should you choose to describe them, would bring you to the borders of what your readers could bear. The danger you have to negotiate is not the dimpled coyness of the past—it is its obscenity’ (2009). She goes on to consider the ways in which history and fiction relate in terms of their shared uncertainty: The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator. . . . Once this is understood, the trade of the historical novelist doesn’t seem so reprehensible or dubious; the only requirement is

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Jerome de Groot for conjecture to be plausible and grounded in the best facts one can get. (2009)

Mantel’s careful choice of the word ‘trade’ professionalizes the writer of historical fiction, grounds them in a rational-world pursuit. Given that these comments come in her fi rst published essay after her Booker Prize victory, Mantel very clearly aligns the writer of historical fiction—the wordsmith, tradesperson—within an economic nexus with novel as commodity. The raw materials of the past are turned into fiction through the labour of the writer, and all that was solid melts into air. What Mantel points out, quite fundamentally, is that the writer of historical fiction continually works with unclean (nonsterile) materials, and they have a volatility and an affective impact that must be considered carefully. The choices inherent in writing about the past are unavoidably ethical in nature, from the mode of composition to the ways in which characters speak, but in making such choices the historical novelist merely echoes the moral and ethical decisions undertaken by all those who would tell ‘history.’

NOTES 1. He asks for it to be changed to ‘coal miner’ as a class had ‘argued reasonably and politely, and didn’t condemn the book out of hand for one word. I changed it as a tribute to them, and because the word “nigger” hurt some of them, and they told me so honestly, and there’s enough hurt in the world already without me adding to it’ (Westall 1985: fol. 2r). 2. See Hanna (2009) for an overview of the problematic influence of televisual representation on the popular cultural imagination.

REFERENCES Connolly, L. 2009. Email to author, 11 November 2009. Cormack, A. 2009. ‘Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in Atonement.’ In Ian McEwan: Critical Perspectives, edited by Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 70–83. De Groot, J. 2008. Consuming History. London: Routledge. Dyer, G. 2001. ‘Who’s Afraid of Influence?’ Guardian, 22 September 2001. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/22/fiction.ianmcewan (accessed 14 June 2010). Field, R. W. 2009. Email to author, 11 November 2009. Fisk, A. 2009. Email to author, 10 November 2009. Forrester, J. 2010. ‘The Lying Art of Historical Fiction. Guardian, 6 August 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/aug/06/lying-historicalfiction (accessed 10 August 2010). Garfield, L. [1970?] Notebook for manuscript of Drummer Boy with additional pages at the back relating to censorship. Seven Stories Archive, LG/01/09/02. Hanna, E. 2009. The Great War on the Small Screen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Hicks, S. 2009. Email to author, 10 November 2009. Jennings, L. 1971. Letter to Geoffrey Trease, 17 June 1971. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Seven Stories Archive, GT/03/15/02/02. Lee, H. 2001. ‘If Your Memories Serve You Well.’ Observer, 23 September 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/23/fiction.bookerprize2001 (accessed 14 June 2001). Leeston, O. 1969. Letter to Jane Lingard, 15 October 1969. Seven Stories Archive, JL/03/01. MacRae, J. 1969. Letter to Jane Lingard, 23 October 1969. Seven Stories Archive, JL/03/02/01. Mantel, H. 2009. ‘Booker Winner Hilary Mantel on Dealing with History in Fiction.’ Guardian, 17 October 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/ oct/17/hilary-mantel-author-booker (accessed 15 June 2010). McEwan, I. 2002. Atonement. London: Vintage. . 2006. ‘An Inspiration, Yes. Did I Copy from Another Author? No.’ Guardian, 27 November 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/27/ bookscomment.topstories3 (accessed 25 June 2010). Middleton, P., and Woods, T. 2000. Literatures of Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nield, J. 1902. Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales. Available as a Project Gutenberg e-book. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1359 (accessed 15 May 2008). Reynolds, N. 2006. ‘The Borrowers.’ Telegraph, 5 December 2006. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1536064/The-borrowers-why-McEwan-is-noplagiarist.html (accessed 10 August 2010). Singwiththespirit. 2009. Email to author, 11 November 2009. Stendahl [Henri Beyle]. 1970. ‘Stendahl on Scott, Le National 1830.’ In Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage, edited by John O. Hayden, 318–21. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sweeney, C. 2010. ‘Historical Novels Fly in the Face of Historian’s Scorn.’ Times, 19 June 2010, 13. Trease, G. 1988. Letter to Lynnet Wilson, 5 February 1988. Seven Stories Archive, GT/03/15/02/04. . 1996. ‘Sixty Years On.’ Children’s Literature in Education 27, no. 3 (1996): 131–41. Wagner, E. 2006. ‘Plagiarism? No, It’s Called Research.’ Times, 27 November 2006. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article650960.ece (accessed 10 August 2010). Waters, S. 2006. Email to author, 31 October 2006. Webb, K. 1978. Letter to Robert Westall, 10 January 1978. Seven Stories Archive, RW/14/01/20. Westall, R. 1977. Letter to Library Association Record, January 1977. Seven Stories Archive, RW/05/03. . 1988. ‘The Matter of the ‘Nigger-Minstrel,’ 7/4/88. Seven Stories Archive, RW/14/05/01/10, 7 April 1988. . N.d.a. ‘On Race and Sexism.’ Seven Stories Archive, RW/01/11. . N.d.b. ‘Reading the Entrails of Realism.’ Seven Stories Archive, RW/01/12. Wilson, L. 1988. Letter to Geoffrey Trease, 3 February 1988. Seven Stories Archive, GT/03/15/02/03.

3

Transgressive Legacies of Memory The Concept of Techné in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table Cătălina Botez

In a book called Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, Lawrence L. Langer noted that the common aspect of verbal and written testimonies provided by various witnesses is ‘the struggle with the impossible task of making their recollections of camp experience coalesce with the rest of their lives. . . . Each work reflects not defiance but a basic human need to interpret the meaning of one’s experience, or to pierce the obscurities that shroud it in apparent meaninglessness’ (1991: 3, 57). It is precisely this comprehension impetus that drove Italian writer and fi rst-generation survivor Primo Levi to write his award-winning books beginning with the very early Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man, 1947) and continuing with La Tregua (The Truce, 1963), Storie naturali (Natural Histories, 1966), Vizio di forma (Formal Defect, 1971) and the much-appreciated Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975).1 The aspect that distinguishes The Periodic Table from the other works is the summative and intrinsically humanist intent of combining in narrative form the author’s technical skills as a chemist with his experience as a camp inmate and Holocaust survivor. Hard to classify in terms of genre due to its intriguing mix of technical science, poetic mythology and life writing, this piece is often referred to as a memoir, ‘a condensed Buildungsroman,’ (Gordon 2001: 140) a ‘symbolic autobiography’ (Scheiber 2007: 47) or ‘an intellectual biography,’ (Guiliani 2003: 7) and even a mystery; each description covers but a limited array of this work’s many facets. In The Periodic Table, the ethical concept of integrity as related to (personal) history, research and writing is closely associated to Levi’s reflections on humanity. His main concern is human probity or the lack thereof, particularly in connection with the problematics of moral survival and the consequences of traumatic history for the present. Equally, Levi stresses man’s lack of rectitude in relationship with other humans and with nature by establishing connections between his family’s history, his pre– and post–World War II experiences and the physical world of chemistry. Additionally, integrity and humankind are examined at the mythical, philosophical and literary levels.

Transgressive Legacies of Memory 29 Because Levi’s views on integrity overlap with his perspective on humanity in its ontological, creative and technological aspects, I propose an exploration of The Periodic Table by means of the Greek philosophical concept of techné.

TECHNÉ—TECHNICS—TECHNICITY—TECHNOLOGY Aristotle fi rst coined the term techné 2,500 years ago. Its meaning and applicability have since been tapped into ‘everything from a philosophical concept or idea, a historical or material process, an anthropological tool or prosthesis, an ontological condition, a mode of discourse, a way of thinking to even the basic state of life itself’ (Bradley and Armand 2006: 9). From Plato and Aristotle to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud to Bergson, Husserl, Benjamin, Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari, and further to Derrida, Stiegler and, more recently, Friedrich Kittler, Manuel de Landa and N. Katherine Hayles, the theory and praxis of technicity have been questioned, debated and investigated in relation to larger areas of knowledge such as nature, the human and animal condition, history, science, evolution, culture and the political. Particularly nowadays, in our era of quantum computing, neural implants, new media, globalization and postcapitalism, the resurgence of techné as technology compels artists, (techno)scientists, philosophers and politicians to rethink the interaction between humans and their (techno)environment, along with its impact on the defi nition and boundaries of the human. Plato compared the Socratic idea of recollection of the immortal soul dubbed anamnesis to the prosthetic/technical accessory to memory called hypomnesis (Plato 2004: 10). By that, a slight hierarchical distinction between thought and artifice (technicity), the transcendental and the empirical, the infinite and the fi nite were implied. It is Aristotle, though, to whom we owe the actual term techné, used mainly to label practical thought/knowledge in relation to the theoretical thought designated by the episteme (Aristotle 1999: 192b–193b). Again, the distinction is made between the philosophical knowledge as an end in itself and the technical knowledge, or craft knowledge, that serves to fabricate objects. Thus, the Aristotelian notion of technicity is synonymous to the particular tool/instrument/prosthesis used by humans to create a so-called ‘technical object.’ According to Aristotle, unlike natural creations (like a tree’s buds, for instance), technical creations require an outside force, or causa efficiens, in order to be brought into being. All in all, as Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand suggest, the Aristotelian vision of ‘techné is congruous to a prosthesis ( . . . pro-thesis, i.e., an addition; what-is-placed-in-front-of) considered ‘in relation to nature, humanity or thought; one that can be utilised for good or ill depending upon who or what happens to wield it’ (2006: 2–3).

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However, the modern philosophy of technology has moved away from the classical divide between nature and technicity. Karl Marx and the ideas foregrounded in historical materialism challenge this opposition by arguing for a reciprocal codetermination of the human and the technical. 2 It is Martin Heidegger, though, who was credited with the truly radical shift from the Aristotelian concept of techné. He posed the ‘question concerning technology’ from an ontological and aesthetical perspective by defi ning techné as poesis. According to him, technology is rooted in language (logos) and the production of text, literature and, implicitly, art. In his now-notorious words, ‘techné belongs to bringing forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic’ (1977: 15, 33–35). It is therefore Heidegger to whom we owe today’s most common view on techné as art, artifice and craft or a system of doing/production. After Heidegger, Jacques Derrida engages with our ‘technological condition’ (1995: 244–45) by questioning the divide between thought and technology (1986: 108) and rendering the Heideggerian distinction between technology and the essence of technology as problematic. He reinstates the centrality of technique in understanding both nature (physis) and life (zoe and bios) as well as thought (logos, psyche, anamnesis) in terms of an ‘originary technicity.’ Later on, Bernard Stiegler amends Derrida’s deconstructionist observations on philosophy and technique by highlighting the need to equally tap into the historicist/materialist and discursive aspects of technology. Dwelling on the problematic condition of the ‘living psychic memory’ aggressed by the ‘dead technical memory’ in the current ‘epoch of hyperindustrialisation’ and unprecedented industrial exploitation, Stiegler (2006: 23) contends that hypermnesis is arguably the topical question of our age . He engages with the paradoxical (and ironical) case of exteriorized memory as ‘lost’ memory, that is, ‘lost’/‘displaced’ knowledge in the broader context of ‘cognitive’ or ‘cultural capitalism’ (2006: 16–17). This lost knowledge he calls hypomnesis, in keeping with the Platonic (and later, Foucauldian) tradition. This is usually the case with ‘material memory,’ that is, such ‘carriers of memory’ like ‘a piece of paper, an annotated book, a diary’ or an object of art that all embody a part of us outside ourselves (Stiegler 2006: 15). Human memory thus exteriorized becomes at once ‘technical’ and tertiary. 3 Stiegler carries on to explain how lithic tools sharpened in Paleolithic times, although not carved for the purpose of storing memory, are retroactively a ‘support for memory’ and therefore constitute a classic case of mnemotechnique. On the other side of the historical spectrum, the ‘supports of objective memory,’ that is, the modern day’s devices such as the personal digital assistant (PDA), television, telephones, GPS and computers, to name just a few, embody what Stiegler calls mnemotechnology; these technological devices and services cause a gradual loss of human memory and knowledge, however, that will eventually trigger forgetfulness, followed by ‘human obsolescence,’ impotence and even futility (2006: 17–19). Thus,

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as Stiegler and his predecessors warn us, the very nature of the human condition and its boundaries are brought into question. A defi ning feature of Stiegler’s understanding of technics is his concept of ‘organized inorganic matter’ that exemplifies the sharpened flint as carrier of ‘epiphylogenetic memory,’ a process that is essential to ‘transindividuation,’ or the transmission and survival of historical, collective memory through individual memory: ‘A sharpened fl int is formed from inorganic matter that is organized by honing it to a point. The gesture of a craftsman [technicien] en-grams [engramme] an organization which is transmitted via something inorganic, opening up for the fi rst time in the history of human life the possibility of transmitting knowledge that is acquired individually, but in a way that is biological’ (Steigler 2006: 26). The existence of such ‘retensional devices’ (the fl int) within ‘mnesic environments’ (a historical society at a certain point in time) and the possibility of transindividuation (i.e., the transmission of its memory to an individual/collective across space and time) are current phenomena that help perpetuate philosophical, religious and political questions. As the following analysis will show, the classic and modern perceptions of techné, in particular its complex relationship with nature and memory through time, are intrinsically connected to Primo Levi’s most profound vision of science, art and the human condition. Chemistry, as scientific knowledge, practical enterprise and stimulus of artistic and mythical thinking, makes the central topic of Levi’s audacious, most authentic and thought-provoking work—The Periodic Table.

THE SPIRIT OF TECHNÉ IN LEVI’S THE PERIODIC TABLE In Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, the question of techné is dealt with at several levels. Although Levi never showed any conspicuous interest in philosophy in itself and was, in fact, quite sceptical of its ‘inconclusive metamorphoses from Plato to Augustine, from Thomas to Hegel, from Hegel to Croce’ (Levi 1995a: 26), his work illustrates a concern with the philosophical, ethical and anthropological questions of his time with regard to applied science, technology, art and the human condition. A scientist well known for his austere humanism,4 he kept well clear from any form of radicalism, from ‘polarized positions and ideological short-cuts,’ preferring the ‘local’ and the ‘circumstantial’ to the general, and a balanced, informed, and well-measured style of writing (Antonello 2007: 91). As Levi declares in his posthumous work The Black Hole of Auschwitz: ‘We need to deal with problems one by one, with honesty, intelligence and humility: this is the delicate and formidable task of today’s and tomorrow’s technicians’ (quoted in Antonello 2007: 91). This ‘delicate and formidable task’ consists, in his case, in the man’s direct interaction with chemical elements and the subsequent production of

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a literary text whose meanings are deeply rooted in experience, history and technical knowledge. His involvement with the small-scale, experimental lab craftsmanship, as opposed to the big science, informs his stance on technics and his attitude towards the natural world. He embraces nature, not only as object of scientific or specialized exploration, but also as a means to understand the human experience and his condition on Earth. That is to say, the narrator in Levi’s text explores the instrumental and empirical aspects of his profession by applying and testing theoretical assumptions about chemical elements, not only in the laboratory, but also outside it. In that sense, Levi’s position regarding nature and practiced science echoes Gaston Bachelard’s concept of ‘rational materialism’ (Antonello 2007: 98–99), which should be thought of, according to analyst Mary Tiles, as ‘applied rationalism’ (1984: 173). To contextualize, she explains that the periodic table is for chemistry precisely what the Newtonian system is for physics, that is, a turning point suggestive of the transition from the empirical level to the theoretical or rational stage. 5 And so, whereas Bachelard makes nuanced observations on the advantages and disadvantages of theorizing science and cautions against the perils of induction and abstractionism, his rational materialism remains moderate, in the sense that it retains strong ties with empiricism and its functional properties, from which it has developed: ‘Transition to this stage [to the rational, theoretic stage] is coincident with transition, at the empirical level, from fenomenology to phenomeno-technique (to use Bachelard’s terms), or from natural history to technologically experimental science’ (Tiles 1984: 173). The Bachelardian concepts of ‘phenomenotechnique’ and ‘technologically experimental science’ resonate with Levi’s own view on chemistry, particularly at the operational level. In fact, techné understood as technicist/technological work and applied science permeates Levi’s writings, particularly the collection of short stories under scrutiny here. The additional genocidal overtones that applied science and chemistry, in particular, have been loaded with in the aftermath of the Holocaust, doubled up by Levi’s own position as chemist-cum-slave-labourer in the Nazi camp, are factors that add up to the complexity of the tainted modern connotation of techné (Belpoliti and Gordon 2001: 174).6 In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi’s humanistic stance shows, however, in his narration of the lager (camp) experience, by engaging the concept of techné to serve such ideas as the restoration of human dignity and humanity after Auschwitz. To that scope, the figure of the chemist is employed as a modern parallel of the Greek concept of homo faber: the technician is the industrious, manual worker and resilient individual (or survivor in his case) who initiates scientific, epistemological and literary experiments and simultaneously becomes the forger of himself. At the personal level, the joint praxis of chemistry and writing offers propitious opportunities to reorder a life shattered by trauma. As Levi declared in an interview with Roberto di Caro in 1987: ‘In my books . . . I see . . . an immense need to put things in order, to put order back into a

Transgressive Legacies of Memory 33 world of chaos, to explain to myself and the others. . . . Writing is a way of creating order’ (Belpoliti and Gordon 2001: 174). Not surprisingly, then, Levi’s choice of words, il sistema periodico, in the collection’s title instead of perhaps la tavola periodica is evocative of his authorial urge to organize and systematize a life’s work and experience according to a meaningful paradigm. As I will show later, however, Levi is ambivalent about order, in that he also insists on the significance of serendipity and chance in scientific progress and artistic achievements. On a grander scale, Levi’s rationalist pragmatism is reminiscent of the values promoted in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly in the Aristotelian virtues of Nicomachean Ethics. Of particular relevance to The Periodic Table and Levi’s outlook on work and art are such ethic virtues as ‘choice and responsibility,’ ‘self-knowledge,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘practical wisdom.’ As Roger Crisp points out, ‘[the Aristotelian] virtues . . . are dispositions engendered in us through practice or habituation’ (Aristotle 2000: xv), as an exercise leading to the ‘virtuous right action.’ Yet this is perhaps the aspect where Levi’s work ethic diverges most from Aristotle’s thought; Levi rejects the righteous outcome in all situations and declares himself most openly an adept of practice and of the trial-and-error approach: ‘Whether in his chemistry, his writing, or his life, Levi pursues knowledge through testing out hypotheses and probing for the limits of error’ (Gordon 2001: 134). In other words, Levi contends the Aristotelian ideal to excel and the habituation in the quest for excellence do not guarantee the right outcome in all cases. As for Aristotle’s rational choice and responsibility, along with the other virtues and their applicability to Levi’s work, they will be looked at in direct relation to the concept of techné as the analysis unfolds. Published in 1975 and covering the narrative period between 1935 and 1967, The Periodic Table is Levi’s most innovative work in terms of composition and thematic systematization. In biographer Carole Angier’s words, it is ‘a subtle, teasing book, in which the chemical element which is the title of each chapter is a metaphor for its subject’ (Angier 2002: 12). Due to its complex composition, it is alternately categorized as a novel, collection of short stories, autobiography, memoir or poetical myth. In terms of content, it relates episodes of Levi’s personal life or fictitious tales organized by analogy with a selection of twenty-one inorganic elements of Mendeleev’s periodic table (which contains 105 elements in all). The result is an insightful, relatively chronological glance at Levi’s own experience in prewar Fascist Piedmont in Northern Italy, then in Auschwitz and back in Italy after the war, all sequences being woven together by stories of chemical reactions and hands-on interaction with matter. As such, the storytelling perspectives are manifold and range from that of a chemistphysicist, a student partisan, an Auschwitz inmate, Holocaust witness and survivor and last, but not least, a skilled writer who frequently changes narrative voices. In fact, his position as a writer, aware of the difficulty

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in categorizing his work, prompts him to commence the last chapter, titled ‘Carbon,’ with a metatextual disclaimer of sorts, meant to set the boundaries of an otherwise hybrid, polyvalent text whose experimental quality intrigues and fascinates: This is not a chemical treatise: my presumption does not reach so far. . . . Nor is it an autobiography, save in the partial and symbolic limits in which every piece of writing is autobiographical, indeed every human work; but it is in some fashion a history. It is—or would have liked to be—a micro-history, the history of a trade and its defeats, victories, and miseries, such as everyone wants to tell when he feels close to concluding the arc of his career. (Levi 1995a: 232) The key concepts employed in this description are ‘chemical treatise,’ ‘autobiography,’ ‘work’ and ‘micro-history.’ Whereas the fi rst two terms indicate a defi nition by negation, suggesting this work should be associated with neither scientific nor life writing in the pure sense of either term, the word ‘work’ alludes to the notion of craftsmanship as both scientific and artistic achievement. Additionally, Levi’s transdisciplinary discourse is also a manifestation of his openly declared responsibility as Holocaust survivor, compelled to communicate his ‘micro-history,’ or individual story, which occasionally turns into a ‘counter-history’ or a form of epistemological resistance against the Aryan propagandistic strategies of World War II. More often than not, this ‘micro-history’ is congruent with the ‘macrohistory’ of the Jewish people, that is, the collective memory shared with both Levi’s predecessors and his fellow lager inmates. Primo Levi’s inspired choice of structuring each chapter around a chemical element (the story begins with ‘Argon’ and ends with ‘Carbon’, i.e., the element of life) resonates with his deep understanding of and respect for the natural order and life’s wondrous material complexity. This holistic view of man as part of nature and subject to constant and constructive interaction with other natural elements emphasizes the relevance of techné to Levi’s oeuvre. The guiding principles promoted in his book regard the ways in which the scientist understands and challenges matter, on the one hand, and equally the ways in which the survivor bears witness through writing, in order to make sense of one’s existence and one’s mission. As such, Levi’s persona shares both the traits of homo scientificus and homo scribendus, two modi vivendi with many similarities in approach and execution, which Primo Levi evokes by means of the amphibian and the centaur: ‘Io sono un amfibio, un centauro. . . . Io sono diviso in due metà. Una è quella della fabrica. . . . un’altra è quella nella quale scrivo, rispondo alle interviste, lavoro sulle mie esperienze passate e presenti. Sono proprio due mezzi cervelli.’7 This metaphor, employed to describe the two essential modes of being for Levi as none other than two halves of a brain, reiterates the notion of humanist rationalism that best describes his attitude towards

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life. In contrast to the Marxist concept of homo laborans, which portrays the working man as alienated by modern machinery and technology and entirely conditioned by his working conditions,8 Levi’s personas do not strip man of his free will, his reason and creative potential. Marx touches a sensitive chord, however, when he sustains that men lose the freedom to own their lives as a consequence of work’s oppressive alienation, and that strikes him as a vexatious paradox particularly in the era of modern enlightenment. This observation appears pertinent when associated with forced labour as the founding principle of the lager system. Inherent to the camp imagery, outside of which Levi’s double persona as worker and writer is unthinkable, is Giorgio Agamben’s compelling doctrine of homo sacer: namely, the prototype of the outsider, the outcast deprived of rights and susceptible by law to being killed by anyone at any time, but not to sacrifice. The problem with this association is, as both Ernersto Laclau and Dominick LaCapra rightly signaled, an oversimplified view of both victimhood and the Nazi ideology and practice: on the one hand, the individual’s isolation from the rest wrongly implies his lack of a collective identity (Laclau 2007: 14); on the other hand, the perpetrator’s profi le is more complex (LaCapra 2007: 14) than that implied in the victimizing of Muselmänner. In the following text, I will have a look at the stylistic and scientific aspects of techné in Levi’s text and the manner in which they comply with either the classical or modern model of techné.

HOMO SCRIBENDUS OR TECHNÉ AS NARRATIVE SKILL The stories contained in The Periodic Table, regardless of the various genres they pertain to, are for the greater part autobiographical, with the exception of the fictional/allegorical chapters ‘Mercury,’ ‘Lead,’ ‘Sulphur,’ ‘Titanium’ and ‘Carbon.’9 The chapters are mostly in chronological order, except the fi rst and last chapters, ‘Argon’ and ‘Carbon,’ respectively, which create an ‘extra-temporal frame of sorts around the text, the former relating the timeless human history of Levi’s ancestors and the latter the equally timeless story of an atom of carbon in the cosmos’ (Emmet 2001: 116). Techné as the art of fictionalizing memory through narrative is a topic that Levi addressed often in his statements. Here is a paratextual example of that sort, the preface to his collection of vignettes titled Moments of Reprieve, where he dwells on the shift from the testimonial to the fictional in his work: At Auschwitz . . . I had seen and experienced . . . things that imperiously demanded to be told. And I had told them, I had testified . . . With the passing of the years, writing has made a space for itself alongside my professional activity and I have ended up by switching to it

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Cătălina Botez entirely. . . . It is possible that the distance in time has accentuated the tendency to round out the facts or heighten the colors: this tendency, or temptation, is an integral part of writing, without it one does not write stories, but rather accounts. (1995b: vii–ix)

Later, in ‘Cerium,’ Levi readdresses the question of fiction writing in a metatextual, self-referential remark on memory, the relieving power of creativity and his choice of style based on a methodic preference for communicability, strength and clarity: Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense and new pleasure. . . . It was exalting to search and fi nd, or create, the right word that is commensurate, concise and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe with the greatest rigour and the least clutter. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant. (1995a: 160) Levi’s rigorous selection of narrative material and the striving for balance between silence and language are classical principles of ars poetica, which defi ne his profile as a technical writer. Just as in chemistry where ‘distilling is beautiful,’ linguistic refi nement is part and parcel of Levi’s concern with techné cum poiesis. The aim for consistency and precision is common to both the profession of writer and technician. As critic Antonello shows: ‘Various elements are shared between the two trades of technology and narrative: a need for symmetry, economy, the form fitting the purpose, careful planning and, crucially, a method of trial and error’ (2007: 101). In The Periodic Table, the creative intent overlaps the autobiographical. From the very fi rst chapter, Levi establishes a relationship between argon (a gas, at once ‘rare,’ ‘noble’ and inert)10 and his Piedmontese-Jewish ancestors through what Baxter describes as ‘disseminated prose form which linguistically embodies the physical Diaspora.’ Baxter maintains that ‘a violent history of discrimination and dislocation means that the Jewish identities have always travelled: names, languages, rituals and traditions are fluid, journeying across vast geographic spaces, absorbing and assimilating salient characteristics along the way’ (2007: 388). This aspect is evident in his ancestor’s toponymic surnames such as Bedarida/Bedarrides, Momigliano/ Montemelian, Cavaglion/Cavaillon, which underwent phonetic changes depending on the family’s migration from Spain to various locations in Italy in about 1500. The nomenclature blended with the agency-inertia dialectic suggests the mutability of their identity. The language Levi artfully employs to describe his predecessors is vulnerable to distortion and equivocation, and it comes counter to traditional accounts of family history; whereas the narrative form is conclusive and exact, the effect is subversively parodic. Instead of passing on to the descendants that unique and ‘memorable

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aspect,’ Levi chooses to deliberately tell us the mock heroic, mundane story of Aunt Susanna, spiced up with details of her remarkable sausages and quarrelling neighbours. Later in the third chapter, titled ‘Zinc,’ Primo Levi maintains the satirical slant when reminiscing how naïvely unaware he used to be of his Jewish otherness before the war. Forced to acknowledge his ‘impure’ quality, he compares it with ‘the impurity that makes the zinc react.’ Before the war, he regarded his Jewishness as ‘an almost negligible but curious fact, a small amusing anomaly . . . a Jew is somebody who at Christmas does not have a tree, who should not eat salami but eats it all the time, who has learnt a bit of Hebrew at thirteen and then has forgotten it’ (1995a: 39). Later in the story, however, things change when Fascism ‘posits itself as the discourse of absolute truth,’ causing this ‘accident of birth’ to be ‘no longer inconsequential’ (Wilson 1995: 98). Levi’s aversion to the politicized Aryan discourse based on racial purity and national homogeny11 manifests itself through his narrative of dissent. In the fragment below, his contorted, overly abundant style make a strong derisive case against the nonsensical Fascist parlance: The rejection was mutual. The [Jewish] minority erected a symmetrical barrier against all of Christianity (goyim, narelim, ‘Gentiles’, ‘the uncircumcised’), reproducing on a provincial scale and against a pacifically bucolic background the epic and Biblical situation of the chosen people. This fundamental dislocation fed the good-natured wit of our uncles (barbe in the dialect of Piedmont) and our aunts (magne, also in the dialect): wise, tobacco-smelling patriarchs and domestic household queens, who would still proudly describe themselves as ‘the people of Israel’. . . . And then in the case of the uncles and aunts who reach an extremely old age (a frequent event: we are a long-lived people, since the time of Noah), the attribute barba (‘uncle’), or, respectively, magna (aunt) tends gradually to merge with the name, and, with the occurrence of diminutives and unsuspected phonetic analogy between Hebrew and the Piedmontese dialect, become fi xed in complex, strange-sounding appellations. . . . Thus came into existence Barbaioto (Uncle Elijah), Barbasachin (Uncle Isaac), Magnaieta (Aunt Maria), Barbamoisin (Uncle Moses). (1995a: 7) Examples like these show, as Baxter explains, Levi’s subversive use of language: Protracted clausal constructions are populated with parenthetical interjections, which in turn are interspersed with etymological explanations, which themselves are saturated with indulgent digressions or polyglottal translations. Levi’s strategies, then, are to mobilise, babelise, and bastardize the language that discriminated against him on the grounds of alterity. (Baxter 2007: 390)

38 Cătălina Botez And it is in fragments like these, where Levi displays the linguistic potential for caricature and mockery, that Levi’s artful employment of language becomes counterpolitical. In other chapters, such as ‘Lead,’ ‘Mercury,’ ‘Sulfur’ and ‘Titanium,’ Levi continues to challenge the reader by writing tales within tales and dispersing the authorial responsibility among several narrators. These fictional identities have nothing to do with the postmodern idea of play. Instead, Levi is more interested in creating counterhistories of otherness and testimonial acts in the fictional mode. Further testimony to Levi’s experimentation with language are such metanarrative paragraphs where ‘the survivor compulsively writes and rewrites the story of his own radical transformation from Italian citizen to disenfranchised ‘Other’, from chemist to thief, from man to animal’ (Baxter 2007: 398). Such accretive strategies as repetition, rewriting and retelling are meant to suggest the protean nature of human identity, as this fragment from ‘Cerium’ describes: I was a chemist in a chemical plant, in a chemical laboratory (this too has to be narrated), and I stole in order to eat . . . and at a certain point I realized that I was reliving—me, a respectable little university graduate—the involution-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian, Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live . . . I stole like him and like foxes: at every favourable opportunity but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. (1995a: 145) This particular episode, which reveals the shameful secret of his survival, is narrated in ‘Cerium,’ the only chapter in which Levi addresses his deportation to Auschwitz. Not surprisingly, this chapter occupies the central position within the collection, with ten chapters preceding it and another ten following it.12 Written almost three decades after his memoir If This Is a Man, in which he dealt extensively with the story of his survival, this chapter is written in a composed, more detached manner: At a distance of thirty years I find it difficult to reconstruct the sort of human being that corresponded, in November 1944, to the name or, better said, to my number 175517. I must have by then overcome the most terrible crisis, the crisis of having become part of the Lager system and I must have developed a strange callousness if I then managed not only to survive, but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to perform rather delicate work, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death . . . Desperation and hope alternated at a rate that would have destroyed almost any normal person in an hour. (1995a: 144) This profound psychological mutation, impossible to fully grasp without a fi rsthand experience of the Shoah, reinforces the idea that man, like

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matter, changes under the influence of his environment: just as the chemical elements metamorphose under pressure, due to modified physical conditions or through combination with other elements, so does the human character become transfigured under persecution and the assault of trauma. This tremendous change explains the crisis of understanding that makes Levi affi rm elsewhere that the reason why the Holocaust is so hard for others to conceive is that the survivor himself, once escaped from the camp system (il sistema concentrationario), fi nds it impossible to relate to his previous condition as inmate later on.

HOMO FABER OR TECHNÉ AS CRAFT Throughout his written work, Levi projects the image of the chemist as homo faber, or the man as tool-maker, creator, fabricator, a ‘technician’ focused on his work upon nature, be it stone, wood, metal or any chemical substance at hand. By practicing a premechanized trade, Levi favours a premodern human relationship to nature and craft and, thus, rejects the Aristotelian idealist separation between the human/cultural and the natural. Echoes of Bachelard and his rational materialism permeate Levi’s view on the continuity and mutual determination between humans and nature, that is, between technology and the natural environment (Bachelard 1953: 32). As a technician, Levi rejoices in the act of breaking the matter’s passive resistance. He may be thought of as a mediator between physis and techné. Matter is also ‘the Spirit’s great antagonist’ (1995a: 36), as well as ‘our hostile mother’ (41) who both facilitates and hinders learning. The chemist’s confrontation with such a grand force is both empowering and dignifying, in that it gives humans the privilege to analyse and theorize the natural world. Science or scientific knowledge, in fact, was classified by Aristotle, along with ‘practical wisdom,’ ‘skill,’ ‘intellect’ and ‘wisdom,’ among the five virtues/states of the soul that lead to truth ‘by affi rmation or denial’:13 The nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter . . . conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and . . . therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table . . . was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry. (1995a: 47) The preoccupation with operational science is, for Levi, ‘the antidote to Fascism’ because its methods are ‘clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness’ (1995a: 46). He counters the ignoble political lie with the verifiable truth on which technoscience is based. In chemistry, the truth about matter is discovered by trial and

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error and experimentation with the elements in situations governed by serendipity, lateral thinking and intuitive decision making. As Levi shows, technicity is inconceivable without hazard: it is central to production and progress and, at the personal level, ensures professional experience because error is also ‘a vessel of ethical Buildung’ (Gordon 2001: 139). In fact, the freedom to commit errors is what distinguishes the work in the factory from the work in the lager, where even the slightest failure or infringement of the rigid laws of the camp meant death. Unlike in chemistry, where scientific law applies to all elements, the discriminatory laws of the lager are destructive of human dignity: the ‘failure to follow orders, failure to understand orders, failure to work beyond physical collapse, the error of assuming any identity or the barest human rights’ could lead to instant death at Buna-Monowitz (Gordon 2001: 144). In derisive cynicism, the words inscribed by the Nazis over the Auschwitz gate ‘Arbeit macht frei’ stand for what Philip Roth calls ‘a horrifying parody of work’ (2001: 5–6). He digs deeper into that notion in an interview with Levi, when he asks the latter about the role of writing in cleansing the concept of work, so tainted by the Shoah. Is the narrative effort in any way motivated by the wish to restore the damaged humanity contained in the ‘disfigured’ perception of arbeit? Dehumanizing as the camp work might have been, the people there, including Levi, were paradoxically driven to do their work properly (lavoro ben fatto) as an incentive to retain their dignity: I am fully aware that after the camp . . . my two kinds of writing (chemistry and writing), did play . . . an essential role in my life. . . . Human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed towards a goal and . . . idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz’s Arbeit) gives rise to suffering and to atrophy. In my case, work is identical to ‘problem solving.’ (Roth 2001: 6–7) Continuing his work as a chemist in a paint factory after the war and simultaneously writing about the camp and professional experience may have solved for Levi the very dilemma of survival after Auschwitz. In The Periodic Table, it is cerium, the chemical element that he stole and scraped at surreptitiously with Alberto by night, that ensured Levi’s survival. Like every other element in the book, cerium is described as having its own identity, with the same reverence and sense of wonder as every other element: There was a mysterious jar on one of the shelves. It contained about twenty gray, hard, colorless, tasteless little rods and did not have a label . . . an element about which I knew nothing, save for that single practical application, and that it belongs to the equivocal and heretical rareearth group family, and that its name . . . celebrates (great modesty on the chemists of past time!) the asteroid Ceres, since the metal and the

Transgressive Legacies of Memory 41 star were discovered in the same year, 1801; and this was perhaps an affectionate-ironic homage to alchemical couplings: just as the sun was gold and Mars iron, so Ceres must be cerium. (Levi 1995a: 146–50) The metaphor of the fl int and its honing for ignition purposes connotes the historical regression to the Stone Age and the Darwinian ‘survival of the fit,’ a concept that is not foreign to fi rsthand survivors of the Shoah. At the same time, the fl int as metaphor of techné is a prosthesis, that is, a carrier of ‘tertiary,’ ‘epiphylogenetic memory’ in Stiegler’s parlance; it is a memory that is symbolically and tragically relived during the Holocaust through a paradoxical reversal of order/values: thus, the return to origins is a ritualistic escape of death, whereas regress stands for progress, that is, survival of the species. In the lager, the fit and the vicious outlived the virtuous, rendering completely useless the Aristotelian code of virtues on the one hand and the Machiavellian concepts of virtù and fortuna on the other: ‘The logic and scale of cause and effect are all skewed, chance determined life and death with a force overwhelmingly beyond the capacity (or virtù) of individuals to try out means to circumvent it’ (Gordon 2001: 145). And so, although Alberto had better chances of survival being immune to scarlet fever, he dies in Auschwitz due to the illogical piccole cose (insignificant things), whereas Levi contracts the illness but eventually survives the Holocaust. Throughout The Periodic Table, the work/struggle with matter is the generative matrix of storytelling. Thus, in ‘Chromium’ we witness the narrator struggling to trace the cause and solution for the mysteriously solidified paint; in ‘Arsenic’ the chemist is up against the hidden substance in the sugar sample, only to solve that mystery in ‘Potassium’; the true nature of the uranium rock is detected in ‘Uranium’; and ‘Hydrogen’ tells the story of young Levi’s efforts to advance as a future chemist. ‘Zinc’ narrates his endeavours to be initiated into laboratory work at university; ‘Nickel’ describes the difficulties involved in extracting nickel, followed by the fictional story of Rodmund and his attempts to extract lead in the chapter of the same name. In ‘Gold,’ Levi is struggling as a partisan and faces imprisonment for the fi rst time, and in ‘Chromo’ he depicts his trials of fi nding work after returning to Turin after the war. Before the war, Levi’s work on diabetes under the commendatore of a chemical factory in Milan, although frustrating and sometimes abusive, mechanical and brutal, helps Levi understand phosphorus and its wondrous nature, while explaining the difficulties of working in an oppressive environment: Phosphorus has a very beautiful name (it means ‘bringer of light’), . . . a Professor Kern, half biochemist and half witch-doctor, in the environment impregnated with black magic of the Nazi court, had designated it as a medicament. . . . Unknown hands left on my bench at night all sorts of plants, a species a day . . . onion, garlic, carrot, burdock, blueberry [etc.] I, day by day, determined their inorganic and total

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Cătălina Botez phosphorus content, and I felt like the donkey tied to a bucket pump. Just as much as the analysis of nickel in the rock had exalted me, . . . so was I humiliated now by the daily dosage of phosphorus, because to do work in which one does not believe is a great affliction. (1995a: 120)

Although most chemical elements he works with are intrinsically connected to some vital physiological function in humans, plants or animals, it is carbon that is considered the epitome of life. It is therefore significant that Levi completes his journey through the periodic table and his autobiographical and mythical meanderings with ‘Carbon,’ the story of the element of life to which he has ‘an old debt’ (1995a: 233). In his description of carbon, echoing Bachelard, Levi challenges, as he often does, the Aristotelian duality of form and matter. As critic Pierpaolo Antonello puts it: ‘Matter is not an undefi ned substance shaped by abstract forms superimposed from outside. It is rather a multifold entity, that displays an infinite array of behaviour and features according not to given “form”, but to given “combination.”’ This indebtedness to what Bachelard dubbed the nature’s ‘conscience mélangeant’ challenges fi xed categories like ‘pure’ versus ‘impure,’ uniformity versus difference, noble versus vile, stable versus unstable (Antonello 2007: 99). And carbon, Levi shows, is no exception: ‘Carbon dioxide . . . is not one of the principal components of air, but rather a ridiculous remnant, an “impurity”, thirty times less abundant than argon, which nobody even notices’ (Levi 1995a: 236). It is this very element, however, that is credited with the creation and maintenance of life. As Levi has shown before, impurities are essential constituents in chemical interactions, and they are most often credited with the advance of knowledge. The carbon dioxide is, in that regard, the essential other in the process of chemical contamination, indispensable for life (Levinas 1969: 43). Not only does Levi warn his reader against the danger of the discriminatory gesture, but he is also an inexhaustible supporter of the holistic view on chemistry: rational judgment is often enhanced by the keenness of ‘smell and touch and the intuitiveness of the eye,’ to which such virtues as ‘humility, patience, method, manual dexterity, nervous and muscular stamina, [and] resilience when faced by failure’ are essential (Levinas 1969: 98). In this context, the hands as instrumental objects of performance are the embodiment of techné. They symbolize the human ability to work, and they also stand for human dignity and autonomy (Gordon 2001: 182). Moreover, the hand as tool for chemical experiments and holder of the pen is both artifice (or technical support of scientific work), and manual producer of written, literary text. It is with this scientific profile in mind that the reader can understand Levi’s reverence towards and description of a single carbon atom’s journey over the course of many centuries through various forms of matter: the green leaves, water, air and lungs of humans and animals:

Transgressive Legacies of Memory 43 Carbon, in fact, is a singular element: it is the only element that can bind itself in long, stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on earth . . . precisely long chains are required . . . but its promotion, its entrance into the living world is not easy and must follow an obligatory, intricate path. . . . If the elaboration of carbon weren’t a common daily occurrence on the scale of billions of tons a week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would by full right deserve to be called a miracle. (1995a: 234–35) As if by miracle, the wandering carbon cell permeates the chemist’s own brain and then transcends the anatomical medium by stepping onto the material, written page through the tip of the author’s pen. This surprising trajectory of the carbon atom stands for the symbiosis of chemical and literary production. At this moment, the difference between techné as craft and techné as production of written text (language, literature, testimony, etc.) is collapsed, and the two media cohere in the materiality of punctuation, the full stop: [The carbon cell] is . . . amongst us, in a glass of milk. . . . It is swallowed. . . . One [cell] crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing. And the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one. (1995a: 241) In the context of Levi’s Holocaust survivorship, this journey is symbolic of the complexity of life, of its synthetic and repetitive quality in which the process of mediation and communication and the pure-impure binary play an essential role. As does, of course, chance alone. As both a physical element and a sign open to interpretation, the carbon atom’s possibilities of ontological and literary meaning are dependent on the nature of the mediator (or interpreter): its possibilities of combination (in both realms) are limited depending on the context. For instance, once the carbon reaches the intermediary vine leaf, its future journey and potential ‘narrative possibilities become limited by the surrounding’ (Martin 1996: 230). But if chance has it and the carbon takes on the shape of a full stop on the piece of paper, its journey is bound to continue through other human minds through an indefi nite number of acts of medi(t)ation.

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CONCLUSION The Periodic Table distinguishes itself from Levi’s other significant works in that it fosters a wide range of responses in relation to the thematic goals of specific analyses, depending on whether the stress falls on memory and testimonial records, literature, mythos, ethics or specialized areas of technoscience. As a system meant to bridge the gap between things and words, the periodic table grants Levi the ideal medium to explore interdisciplinary grounds of knowledge and transgress them in an attempt to grasp the meaning of natural life in general, and human life (and posttraumatic experience) in particular. Levi’s exceptional merit consists in his courageous endeavour to come to terms with an existence marked by the enormous shadow cast by the Holocaust and to reassess the boundaries of human and professional integrity. The Periodic Table as memoir, fiction, autobiography, treatise of chemistry or all in one offers a rich enough exegetic spectrum to lend itself to an interpretation based on the Greek concept of techné. The current study has centred on techné as both the art-and-craft approach to science and writing and has covered its meanings in ancient and modern times. As such, the stories built around the twenty-one inorganic elements of Mendeleev’s periodic table have engaged in complex ways with representations of man as both homo faber (man at work) and homo scribendus (creative man/ man who writes), occasionally calling in interpretations of homo sacer (Giorgio Agamben) and homo laborans (Marx). The common ground of all these prototypes of man is integrous work, understood as scientific, technological and creative instances of decent labour focused on the extraction of practical and theoretical. Although not openly interested in philosophy and abstract thinking, Levi’s outlook on honest work and the human condition shifts away from such Aristotelian dualities as episteme versus techné, abstract theoretical thought versus practical thought; alternatively, he prefers to conceive of labour in terms of Bachelard’s rational materialism and the Heideggerian understanding of techné as poiesis. Aristotle, however, looms large as a classical model of ethical thinking, and his perennial views on ethical virtues imbue Primo Levi’s discourse on practical wisdom, choice and responsibility, scientific knowledge, skill and intellect. In terms of narrative style and so-called ars poetica, Levi is a declared adept in terms of intelligibility and communicability of style, clarity and accessibility. Levi is a compelling writer engrossed in profound meditations on and communication of the meaning of techné and its metamorphoses into technics, technique and technology pertinent to our modern time—a time fraught, as it is, with contradictions, symmetries and inconsistencies. The message he transmits via his multifarious work is a wholistic understanding of the integral man as constitutive part of his physical, social, political and cultural environment, and a strong belief in man’s resilience in the face of historic cataclysms.

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NOTES 1. All quotations refer back to the 1995 edition in English, translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. 2. For an interpretation of the problematic radicalism in Marx, see Bradley and Armand (2006: 5). 3. ‘Tertiary’ as in third after ‘the memory common to the species, or genome, which Weismann called germen, and the memory of the individual, termed somatic, conserved by the central nervous system in which is deposited the memory of experience’ (Stiegler 2006: 26). 4. In the introduction to an edited collection of chapters, J. Farrell describes Levi as belonging to a generation of austere humanists who believed in the ‘cult of reason’ and perceived man as ‘rational animal.’ He mentions R. Gordon’s placement of Levi within the ‘Enlightenment’ current of thought that prioritizes such ‘ordinary virtues’ as ‘common sense, a respect for rights, a recognition of the worth of a pursuit of happiness’ (2004: 9–11), which partially echo the Aristotelian system of virtues as enumerated in his Nicomachean Ethics. 5. Tiles had previously explained how ‘a reading of Boyle, Newton, Priestly or Lavoisier shows just how difficult was the problem of determining chemical compositions and establishing a list of elements’ in the absence of a unifying theory that determined the objective identity of such elements in relation to their chemical composition, and not their appearance, taste or combinatory qualities (Tiles 1984: 172–73). 6. For a riveting account of the classic versus modern connotations of techné in literature, philosophy and politics, see the documentary fi lm by D. Barison and D. Ross titled The Ister (which is the ancient name for Europe’s greatest waterway, the Danube). In this video-fi lm contemporary philosophers (Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and HansJürgen Syberberg), along with archeologists, natural scientists and architects discuss the concept of techné starting from M. Heidegger’s 1942 Hölderlin lectures and meditate on the nature of war, oppression and genocide. Particularly interesting is the long meditative pause on the significance of techné as technology and its logistic and philosophical implications in the occurrence of the Holocaust. D. Barison and D. Ross, The Ister (Melbourne: Blackbox Sound and Image). 7. ‘I am an amphibian, a centaur. . . . I am divided in two halves. One belongs in the laboratory. The other one is in my writing, my response to the interviewers, and in the work on my past and present experience. I am like the two halves of a brain’ (Emmett 2001: 117; author’s translation). 8. ‘[Marx] is not prepared . . . to defi ne the essence of humanness in terms of . . . reason or faith. . . . For Marx human beings are not essentially rational creatures, or children of god, or political animals. By contrast, human beings are not essentially anything; they are what they do—and what they do is work to derive a life for themselves from the world around them. Everything about them, including their consciousness of themselves and their understanding of nature and their belief in God is a direct product of what they physically do in their daily lives’ (Johnston 1999: n.p.). 9. They are for the most part ethnological or allegorical stories that carry an ethical message. 10. ‘There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean “the New”, “the Hidden”, “the Inactive” and “the Alien”’ (Levi 1995a: 3).

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11. The racial laws were made public in Italy as the Manifesto of Italian Racism (1938). 12. The centrality of Levi’s testimonial gesture to his narrative work exemplifies the Aristotelian virtue of ‘voluntariness and responsibility’: Levi makes a rational choice to preserve memory and, one may argue, he does so by conferring Auschwitz the central position. His sense of responsibility for the preservation of truth also shows in his choice to narrate a less-than-laudable act of greed—not a virtue, but a vice. 13. Aristotle, Nicomacheam Ethics (vi.3. II 39b). The acquisition of practical wisdom requires experience, and its role is mainly to figure out the means to aims that are determined independently of it. By ‘science,’ Aristotle means the acquisition of ‘what is necessary and eternal’; skill involves ‘production rather than action,’ and intellect is ‘concerned with non-demonstrable fi rst principles’ (xxv).

REFERENCES Agamben, G. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness at the Archive. Translated by D. Heller-Loazen. New York: Zone. Angier, C. 2002. The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Antonello, P. 2007. ‘Primo Levi and “Man As Maker.”’ In The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, edited by Robert S. C. Gordon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 89–103. Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1999. Physics. Translated by R. Waterfield. Oxford: World’s Classics. . 2000. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and edited by R. Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bachelard, G. 1953. Le matérialisme rationnel. Paris: PUF. Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barison, D., and D. Ross. 2004. The Ister. Video. Melbourne: Blackbox Sound and Image. Baxter, J. A. 2007. ‘Writing as a Means of Survival in the Testimonies of Primo Levi.’ In The Camp Narratives of Internment and Exclusion, edited by C. C. Hogan and M. M. Domine. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 384–402. Belpoliti, M., and R. Gordon, eds. 2001. The Voice of Memory: Primo Levi Interviews, 1961–1987. New York: Polity. Bradley, A., and L. Armand, eds. 2006. Technicity. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Derrida, J. 1995 ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs.’ In Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, edited by E. Weber, translated by P. Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 1986. Memoires for Paul de Man. Translated by C. Lindsay et. al. New York: Columbia University Press. Emmett, L. 2001. ‘L’uomo salvato dal suo mestiere: Aspects of Se questo e un uomo Revisited in Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico.’ Italian Studies 56: 115–28. Farrell, J. 2004. Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist. Oxford: Peter Lang. Giuliani, M. 2003. A Centaur in Auschwitz: Refl ections on Primo Levi’s Thinking. New York: Lexington. Gordon, R. S. C. 2001. Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Heidegger, M. 1977. ‘The Question Concerning Technology.’ In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper. Johnston, I. 1999. ‘Lecture on Marx.’ Liberal Studies 112 (Feb.). http://records.viu. ca/~johnstoi/introser/marx.htm (accessed 9 September 2010). LaCapra, D. 2007. ‘Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben.’ In Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life, edited by M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 136–163. Laclau, E. 2007. ‘Bare Life or Social Indeterminancy.’ In Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life, edited by M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 11–23. Langer, L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Levi, P. 1995a. The Periodic Table. Translated by R. Rosenthal. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. . 1995b. Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz. Translated by R. D. Feldman. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingi. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Martin, S. ‘The Quest for the Ultimate Sign: Binaries, Triads and Matter in Primo Levi.’ Romance Languages Annual: RLA/ Purdue Research Foundation 8: 225–31. Plato. 2004. Meno. In Protagoras and Meno, translated by R. C. Bartlett. Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press. Roth, P. 2001. ‘Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi.’ In Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. London: Jonathan Cape. Ruff, F. G. 1997. Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheiber, E. S. 2007. ‘Demeter at Auschwitz: The Use of Mythology in Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico.’ Forum Italicum 41 (1): 43–58. Stiegler, B. 2006. ‘Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: The Memories of Desire.’ In Technicity, edited by A. Bradley and L. Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 15–42. Tiles, M. 1984. Bachelard: Science and Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 15–42. Wilson, R. 1995. ‘Narrated Memories: The Writings of Primo Levi.’ Acta Germanica: German Studies in Africa 23: 93–106.

4

Fictions and Histories Patricia Duncker

Why should any writer choose to write historical fiction? Nearly every classic fiction writer has written at least one solid period piece. George Eliot wrote Romola describing Florence in the 1490s and the rise and fall of Savanorola. Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, remaking the French Revolution to terrifying effect. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is, in fact, an historical novel, although it does fall into that intriguing genre of period writing, the recreation of the remembered past, like Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. When a writer chooses to set a novel fifty or sixty years back from the time of writing, the contemporary reader is always made to reflect upon recent shifts and changes. We contemplate what we have become by looking at the choices made by the previous generation. This can be a frightening business. But it takes effort, industry, research and a giant leap of the imagination to create another fictional space in a remote time. Flaubert wanted to write nothing but fiction dealing with classical antiquity, and when he had murdered Madame Bovary, he produced Salambô, a novel set in Carthage during the Punic Wars. His classical heroine, however, like the hapless nineteenth-century doctor’s wife, also ends up dead. And of course, in the end, all novels take on the mask of the historical novel as they step back from us into the past. So why do we write self-consciously historical fiction? And why do we want to read these fictions that play games with recreating history? Indeed, what is history, so far as historical fiction is concerned? Every writer who attempts the project of remaking history must have, whether they are aware of it or not, a quite concrete notion of what history is, what it means and what its ultimate significance must be to us, the past’s inheritors. It is not only professional historians who write history, and as some recent debates among historiographers bear witness, it is not only novelists who invent fiction. ‘Historian’ was the common term for a novelist in the nineteenth century. George Eliot describes Fielding as an historian. The French word for ‘story’ is histoire. I cannot and do not want to avoid the connections. I think there are several reasons why fiction writers should busy themselves with an imaginative historical reconstruction of the past.

Fictions and Histories 49 Some writers use historical fiction for a very serious purpose: to avoid the consequences of speaking openly on taboo subjects. Wrap it up in period exotica, and the reading public will not feel threatened or uncomfortable. The most obvious examples of this are to be found in homosexual historical fiction, usually, but not always, set in classical antiquity. If homosexual passion was socially acceptable in ancient Greece, and if clever men like Socrates or heroic ones like the Emperor Hadrian carried on with gorgeous boys, then it can be described as if it was an admirable and natural state of affairs. And if it was then, why not now? This is the ‘progressive past’ school of history. One way or another, homosexual passions between men have always been more socially acceptable than passions of any kind between women. But if the reader is in a state of denial, the whole thing can be viewed as a very peculiar practice that went on in remote times and only concerned chaps who were keen on gladiators, actors and pretty athletes. Interestingly, several women have used classical antiquity to write about homosexual love, keeping themselves safe at two removes, by writing historical rather than contemporary fiction and about homosexual men rather than lesbians. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Mary Renault’s many novels (The Bull from the Sea, The King Must Die, The Praise Singer, etc.) are obvious examples. Both women were writing in the 1940s and 1950s, before the advent of the women’s movement and militant lesbian writing of the 1970s and 1980s. So their work might be described as an historical closet. History looks temptingly seasonal. The broad outlines can appear to repeat themselves. The rise of a city or an empire will always be the prelude to its fall. Revolutions always consume their own children. The inevitable decadence sets in. This is the ‘cycles of eternal return’ school of historical fiction. A cyclical version of history is always conservative. Fiction writers are often beset by the awful urge to use history as a moral basket full of metaphors for change, decay and rebirth, all disappointingly predictable. Novelists rarely present this kind of history as teleological or progressive, but it is usually seen as deterministic. Mutability is inexorable. Indeed change, rather than development, is that which constitutes history. Inevitable change and its equally inevitable return to recognizable original structures or points of origin is akin to the ‘longue durée’ of the annales school—that which changes so slowly it has the stealth of geological time, the grand continuities of history. Build all this into the structure of a novel and it is easy to think you are mouthing a Great Truth. Your pronouncements will all sound deeply significant, with no effort on your part: thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore. The writers of historical fiction, which I fi nd most suspect is the ‘history enables us to see essential truths more clearly’ school. One trick often used here is to extract a contemporary problem—such as drugs, terrorism or religious conflict—and then write an historical novel about the Reformation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s opium addiction or Guy Fawkes. The trap

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here becomes clear when we ask what remains unchanged, however far we venture into the past. The answer is always the same: human nature and the most fundamental passions of the human heart. This is the most conservative political conclusion of all and perhaps the most mendacious. If we do not change now, then we are looking at nothing but tragedy and general catastrophe. To argue that we, as human beings, have not changed our behaviour, customs and practices and even how we feel is, at the very least, to misread the facts. The ‘essential truths’ school is also the version of the historical novel that is most vulnerable to the ‘God wottery, thou saucy knave’ style of writing, that is, the jolly heritage version of history. Usually, in these worlds, whatever the period, although in the English pulp historical novel it tends to be Regency, Napoleonic or sub–Jane Austen, the heroines are prettier, with ever-more slender waists; and the men are nobler, braver and hairier, with bigger balls. No one ever farts or fucks, although they may occasionally—daringly—vomit and faint. These fictions are always remorselessly heterosexual, tediously predictable and best sellers. The books usually embody and enact the prejudices of the readers who consume them. The pleasure of historical fiction for both the writer and the reader is simple. The novel is an ideal form for conveying information, the sense of landscapes, customs, objects, interiors, carrying us into the other country of imagined worlds. Fiction is the original form of virtual reality. We want to live for a while in another world and to forget our own. I want to consider two novels as case studies, which represent two different methods of making historical fiction. These novels were written one hundred years apart, one in the 1860s and the other in the 1960s; one was written by a man and one by a woman. One deals with the remembered past, the other with a remote period that has left little concrete evidence upon the historical record. These two novels demonstrate two different methods of constructing the illusion of history, two different practices of historical fiction. I want to speak about Hella Haasse’s classic tale of fifth-century Rome, Een Nieuwer Testament (1964/1993; literally, ‘A more recent testament’: The novel is translated under the silly and inappropriately melodramatic title Threshold of Fire) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865– 69/1982). Both novels have been in print ever since they were published. Tolstoy was born in 1828 and the gigantic historical fresco, which made his name in Russia, is set in his parents’ lifetimes. Indeed, his father makes a brief appearance in the novel. The book opens in Anna Pavlovna’s salon in July 1805, and the epilogue, describing Pierre and Natasha’s marriage and Tolstoy’s theory of history, ends the book in 1824. When Tolstoy was writing, there were survivors from that generation still living. One of Tolstoy’s critics, who bemoaned his lack of respect for great men and generals, had fought in the battle of Borodino. He did, however, praise Tolstoy’s description of the battle.

Fictions and Histories 51 War and Peace was fi rst published in instalments over four years. He began writing in 1863; the fi rst instalment was published in 1865 and the last in 1869. This method of publication meant that, like many other nineteenth-century novels, the fi rst audience would have experienced the story as part of their own personal histories, an unfolding through time, rather than the concentrated, somewhat devastating experience of reading 1,500 pages, which we have now. Tolstoy’s theory of history is elaborated at length, and very repetitiously, throughout the book. Again, the fi rst audience would have encountered his diatribes in small doses. Thus the fi rst experience of reading this novel, alongside the process of its making, is unique and can never be repeated. The narrator of War and Peace remains very close to the author. At one point he tells us that his ‘father’s house’ in Moscow was not burned. The history of Russia that he is describing is his history, the national history to which he lays claim. He has a tale to tell and an axe to grind. His argument is with his primary sources. His enemies are the professional historians. His fiction is mobilized to convince us of his version of history. And his version of history is as follows. History is a mighty engine, made up of a mass of apparently random, unpredictable events. No human being knows and none can therefore determine the course of history, least of all those who imagine they are in command. In fact, it is especially interesting to look at the lives of great men—and I do mean men here because women appear to belong to the unconscious of history—for as Tolstoy argues: A king is the slave of history. . . . The higher a man stands in the social scale, the more connections he has with others and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the predestination and inevitability of every act he commits. (1982: 718) The random, unpredictable nature of history is an illusion. It may appear that way to us, but that is not how it appears to God. Every act is preordained, and always has been, throughout all eternity. History cannot be altered and cannot be stopped. It is a living process of organic nature, whose only purpose is to fulfi l itself. Tolstoy’s version of history is chiliastic, pessimistic and magnificent. Human lives are neither unnecessary nor without meaning. Our whole happiness depends upon understanding this gigantic force, which has us in its claws, and following the destiny that is already ours, preordained from the beginning of time itself, with joyous hearts. Kutuzov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian armies, is the real hero of War and Peace because he understands that the invading armies of Napoleon will inevitably be destroyed. They will fling themselves against the passive, stoic refusal of Russia to be possessed, and be broken in the attempt. This passive, stoic refusal manifests itself in every aspect of the

52 Patricia Duncker Russian retreat: the victory at Borodino, which no one but Kutuzov described as a victory; the peasants setting fi re to their grain stores; the departure of the Moscow society ladies to their country estates, rather than receive the self-styled emperor; the looting of the shops and the fi ring of Moscow; even the appalling weather; everything resists Napoleon because it is in the nature of Russia to resist. Kutuzov both comprehends and embodies the most powerful force in Russia’s history: ‘the unconscious, universal swarm-life of mankind’ that ‘uses every moment of the life of kings for its own purposes.’ This ‘unconscious, universal swarm-life’ is, by a curious fictional affiliation, linked to the will of Providence. The will of the people incarnates the desire of God. Kutuzov is ‘one of those rare and always solitary individuals who, divining the will of Providence, subordinate their personal will to it’ (Tolstoy 1982: 1285). Kutuzov achieves this mystical union with history by struggling to do nothing whatsoever. He turns procrastination into high politics. He spends most of the novel asleep or reading novels or sobbing, whenever he is confronted by a sentimental and moving expression of the Slavic soul. He orders the armies to retreat, retreat and retreat again. He avoids battles at all costs. He is so fat that he has to be assisted onto his pony. All his generals are plotting against him. He does not, in short, act the part of a hero. We see Petya Rostov doing just that and getting a bullet in his brains for his idiocy. It is not courage but cunning that is vindicated in Tolstoy’s theory of history. Kutuzov alone is listening to the music of history. He understands its significance because he understands the people: ‘This extraordinary power of insight into the significance of contemporary events sprang from the purity and fervour of his identification with the people’ (Tolstoy 1982: 1287). And this, according to Tolstoy, is real Russian patriotism, this passionate bond with ordinary people. And Kutuzov’s passion is reciprocated. In one telling scene, (Tolstoy 1982: part III, chapter 4) a peasant’s small daughter, Malasha, hidden on the top of the stove in the front room, which becomes the army council chamber, listens to the disputing generals. Tolstoy describes the scene from her point of view. We see Kutuzov from the outside. Without understanding the arguments she hears, the child instinctively sides with the old man, whom she nicknames ‘Granddad.’ She registers his homely simplicity, his passive resistance to his warmongering colleagues, his ‘sly glance,’ his cunning. It is the peasant in Kutuzov who resists. But Tolstoy goes further. The central characters of War and Peace—Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who dies as much from superciliousness as war wounds, and the slightly dotty Pierre Bezuhov—are both searching for meanings, answers, the key to the moral life. They are both aristocrats with more money than sense. The secret of goodness and happiness, however, is effortlessly understood by an illiterate peasant, Platon Karatayev, whom Pierre encounters among the prisoners hustled out of Moscow. Karatayev is a Christ figure. He talks in proverbs and foretells the story of his own martyrdom in a tale of the merchant

Fictions and Histories 53 and the murderer, both of whom are saved by God’s goodness. The secret of his happiness is in love, the love of his fellow men and of all living things, and in his contentment with his inevitable destiny. Karatayev never struggles against fate. He accepts, and he teaches others to do likewise. Not surprisingly, this insistence on the part of Tolstoy as novelist and alternative historian, that it is the peasant and the ordinary soldier who are the agents of history and that the upper classes have everything to learn from them, went down exceedingly well with the Bolsheviks. One of the most acute critics of Tolstoy is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, otherwise known as Lenin. Lenin realized that the period of Tolstoy’s writing life, from 1862 to 1904, was the crucial element that shaped his interpretation of the earlier period in history. Kutuzov’s passive pessimism was inevitably attractive to Tolstoy. It was his own response to the upheaval in his own times. Commenting on Tolstoy’s work in 1911, Lenin wrote: Tolstoyism, in its real historical content is an ideology of an Oriental, an Asiatic order. . . . Pessimism, non-resistance, appeals to the ‘Spirit’, constitute an ideology inevitable in an epoch when the whole of the old order ‘has been turned upside down’, and when the masses . . . do not and cannot see what kind of a new order is ‘taking shape.’ (Macherey 1966: 311) The charge of reactionary pessimism was among the early attacks delivered against the novel. Tolstoy’s philosophy destroyed all hope of progress and improvement. Shelgunov, in the progressive paper the Affair, declared that War and Peace set ‘Eastern fatalism against Western reason’ (Troyat 1965: 317). What Tolstoy’s fi rst critics could not forgive was the fact that, not only did he glorify vulgar peasants, but he was also rude about great men. An article in the conservative journal the Russian made the following comment: What the novelist absolutely cannot be forgiven is his offhand treatment of figures such as Bagration, Speransky, Rostopchin and Ermolov, who belong to history. To study their lives and then judge them on the basis of evidence is all well and good; but to present them, without any reason, as ignoble or even as repellent . . . is in my opinion an act of unpardonable irresponsibility and provocation, even in an author of great talent. (Troyat 1980: 315) Nobody belongs to history. The past does not take out a copyright on our lives. Anyone can be remade or reinterpreted in fiction. But in fact, the problem here is not only Tolstoy’s politics but also his method of making writing—realism. Realism gives the illusion of truth through the intensity of detail. Detail is intimate, sympathetic, but it is also merciless. In one famous passage in the novel Tolstoy takes on Thiers, one of Napoleon’s historians,

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and routs him utterly, with a wicked flourish. Thiers recounts an incident in which Napoleon interrogates a captured Cossack. Tolstoy gives Thiers’s version inside his own, so that the fictional text becomes a commentary on the supposedly historical anecdote. Tolstoy gives the Cossack a context, a history and a name. He then retells the incident, not from Napoleon’s point of view, but from that of the cunning Cossack. The positioning of the reader is crucial in this passage. We too know who Lavrushka is and where he comes from. We are inside the novel’s discourse. Our view of Napoleon and his hagiographers is ironic because we already know the emperor and his generals too intimately to be overawed. We have become as insolent as Lavrushka. The very detail with which Tolstoy describes the self-serving Cossack stakes a claim for the novelist’s omniscient authority. Thiers makes assumptions about the unsophisticated ‘Oriental mind.’ Tolstoy undermines his racism. The balance of power played out in the Frenchman’s text is reversed. It is Napoleon who is left looking like a pompous fool. It is the French who have been duped. Lavrushka is given the hindsight of history. He warns the emperor, ‘it’s likely to be a long job,’ and he is proved right. But the reader trusts the Cossack because he has the same sly look as the old general, Kutuzov. Women have decorative rather than significant roles in Tolstoy’s epic. I am tempted to retitle the novel War and Women, given that courtship is the central occupation of the principal characters when the battles recede. Women become historically significant once they are married. Tolstoy’s Natasha, poetically radiant but fatally naïve for most of the book, spends her time singing and dancing or leaning enchantingly out of windows. At the end of the novel she fulfils history’s purpose, designated especially for her, and marries Pierre. Natasha needed a husband. A husband was given her. And her husband gave her a family. And she not only saw no need of any other or better husband but as all her spiritual energies were devoted to serving that husband and family, she could not imagine, and found no interest in imagining, how it would be if things were different. (Tolstoy 1982: 1372) In all fairness to Tolstoy, he did not remain wedded to these reactionary views on the destinies of women. Indeed, The Kreutzer Sonata, written more than twenty years after War and Peace, the book that caused a scandal in Russia and was widely debated throughout the society, argued a trenchant case against heterosexuality. Tolstoy proposed that husband and wife should live together like brother and sister, apart from the odd bid to conceive children, on the grounds that heterosexual intercourse, being an act that takes place between nonequals, is degrading, humiliating, even disgusting for both parties. Not surprisingly, The Kreutzer Sonata has proved something of a discovery among some circles of radical and revolutionary feminists. 2 Do women write a different kind of historical

Fictions and Histories 55 fiction than men write? Do they construct history in a different image? Not necessarily, I would argue, although the accent may well fall rather differently. Everything will depend upon the mode of making writing that the novelist chooses to use. Tolstoy’s method of making history was shaped by his method of making writing. He is persuasive because the minute, domestic detail of his realism gives the illusion of the camera. His history is not narrated at second hand from a great distance but is instead visualized by the characters in action, experienced, overheard. Napoleon and Alexander the First are presented using exactly the same methods that are used to represent Pierre, Andrei Bolkonsky, Lavrushka, Natasha, Denisov. There are no textual markers to distinguish between them. If you believe in one, you will believe in another. The boundaries between fiction and history are deliberately blurred. Hella Haasse’s novel Threshold of Fire is set during the fifth century, between approximately 380 to 414 AD, an obscure but key period in the later Roman Empire when Christianity, now the official state religion, began to stamp out all the old pagan rites by force. Haasse chooses a moment of transition when the old order changes and gives way to the new. Writers are the scribes who register these changes, so it is entirely appropriate that the action of the novel should centre on a writer, the last great Latin poet Claudian. Claudian’s work has been crucial to historians attempting to reconstruct the fi rst decade of the rule of the Emperor Honorius, which began in 395 AD. This was also a period when the successful writer had a public role to play, access to power and the ears of the great. Claudian was a flatterer and a satirist. He put his art at the service of the factions who fed him. But his writing could still be a direct influence on public events. A good epigram gets him into trouble. Fiction and poetry are now consumed and produced largely as private entertainment, but these still can and do have a public role as commentary and critique on contemporary public events. In rare but significant instances, books cause riots. The book is about loss, waste, endings. Haasse’s cast of characters presents a list of displaced persons, poised at the moment of accepting their dissolution. The book is an oblique but telling attack upon state Christianity. This is the religion that preaches intolerance and sanctimonious selfrighteousness. ‘Pride, pride, but dressed in deceptively humble garments. . . . The Nazarene did not act wisely when he preached a doctrine that most people would misunderstand’ (Haasse 1993: 71). Narrow, authoritarian Christianity is the motive force for the prefect Hadrian. His opinions are not described. The reader hears what he thinks, watches what he does. What kills an historical fiction most thoroughly and rapidly is a tooobvious overdependence on sources. This happens to the best of us. George Eliot tells her readers far more about Renaissance hats in the opening chapters of Romola than we could ever wish to know. Walter Scott gets lost in anecdotes told by voluble yokels with authentically and unintelligibly represented Scottish accents. But on this point Haasse is deft, subtle,

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atmospheric and downright clever. The design of Threshold of Fire actually aids her in conveying a sense of place and her particular period of history. Most of the novel is created through memory. One single incident, the fatal dinner party at the house of Marcus Anicius Rufus, complete with an impending live sex act and animal sacrifice, is interrupted by Hadrian’s soldiers and then investigated by the prefect himself. The dinner party brings together all the main players and the themes of the book. Hadrian, as judge of the affair, interrogates each character in turn and fi nds that he too is forced to reconstruct his own past, his personal links with the people before him and also to interrogate himself. Memory, in fiction, is closely tied up with description. Thus Haasse is able to solve the problem of recreating her sources. As Hadrian remembers, so she describes. Memory is always selective: details stand out, a smell, a texture dominates. Memory, unreliable, wavering, unstable, is nevertheless the most potent tool we have to uncover our past. For the historian, memory survives in sources, archives, ledgers, bills, buildings, clothes, physical objects and written documents, even in the texture of the Earth. Archaeology and history are irrevocably bound together because archaeology literally unearths the past. Oral traditions, oral histories, however dubious, are the closest we can approach to historical memory in societies that do not preserve written documents. A novelist uses all those things but even stranger ones besides: the scent of a woman’s dress, a dream, a family resemblance, a china cup, the smell of crushed hay or, in the case of the Prefect Hadrian, his own raised hand, as he speaks the words of his office in the ritual oath: ‘I swear that I shall pass judgement in the spirit of the law’ (Haasse 1993: 86). The words ‘I swear’ are fi rst uttered by the prisoner, the disguised poet Claudian. They cause Hadrian to remember his promise to his dying mentor, Eliezar, ‘under the spell of those lacklustre eyes, Hadrian raises his right hand: I swear’ (85). The novelist observes, creates and manipulates patterns, repetitions. Plots, which are causal, cannot operate without them. These are the ironic methods fiction uses to teach its meanings. Random, unconnected events may be the stuff of life, but they are not, and cannot be, the stuff of fiction—nor of history. We desire meaning and significance. We look for connections and causes. We look for a pattern, and when it is not to be found in the evidence, we fi nd it anyway, so great is our desire for the reassurance that our lives are not senseless and beyond our understanding. Memory supplies the key. When Claudian says, ‘But I swear that I have never sacrificed a cock unless it was in your presence’ (Haasse 1993: 43), Hadrian remembers: An image rises from the depths of time. . . . A walled villa and outbuildings, a small settlement set among fields, olive groves, fishponds. . . . Memory focuses on a fl imsy lean-to of woven reeds standing on one of the countless marshy islands; a raft, tied to poles thrust in the mud. . . .

Fictions and Histories 57 Statues move, come to life: half-naked youths, surprised in their hiding place, leap away from a fi re-blackened stone used since time immemorial by the farm workers for secret sacrifices to the ancient fertility gods. (53–54) The descriptions are built from fragmented perceptions, sharp, imagistic and always closely tied to the consciousness of the character that remembers. Here Hadrian is remembering his fi rst encounter with Claudian. He sees the figures as statues, moving, coming back to life in his memory. But this is how the reader will also imagine the figures in classical antiquity. And historical fiction set in this period will also try to do precisely what Hadrian does, make the statues live. The descriptions of the monuments in Rome demonstrate the cleverness of Haasse’s method. The temples are ruined, abandoned, desolate. These are, in fact, the fi rst days of their ruin, but in an even greater stage of decay, this is how the visitor would see them now. She is placing us in history, but also reaching to touch our own consciousness of Roman Rome, as a city ruined. Haasse chooses the metaphor of the fresco: I see images from that former life as though they appear on a mural partially obliterated by age: a face, a gesture, the outline of a figure, a group of faded colours, suggesting what it was when it was fresh, but now eaten by decay, cracked, slowly peeling. (1993: 153) Her themes and the metaphors she is using are superimposed upon each other; they also echo the reader’s only possible experience of the period she is describing. One element that would strike us most forcibly as different in the ancient world would be the furniture and the interiors. Haasse never labours these details; instead she works very carefully with the character’s point of view. Description in fi ction, if it is to be effective, always develops a particular character’s point of view. Description, like memory, is always partial and selective. It therefore needs to be located in a particular consciousness. Otherwise, the description floats free of its context. Description gives the text eyes and a mind. Why are we watching this rather than that? If description is tied to a particular point of view, you know why—and the text then pushes outwards, into the world, making the world, and inwards, into the mind of the person seeing what is described. Claudian, in the house of Marcus Anicius Rufus, gazes at the traditional decorations, the mythological paintings, and interrogates their power: Was it the glow of the lamps, . . . was it the painted figures on the walls. . . . Through the open door, I could see, directly before me in the reception room, the dark form of Pluto. (Haasse 1993: 163)

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The effect of this interior will lead to Claudian’s sudden resurgence, his acknowledgement of the man he was. Thus, the character registers things he would normally take for granted with an intensity that justifies their representation in the narrative. We are not being given a gratuitous fifthcentury stage set. Claudian sits reading the past off the walls, and so do we. Thus, the interiors are both objectively described and psychologically experienced by the character himself. There are only two female characters in Threshold of Fire, and both have minor parts. The first is Serena, wife of Flavius Stilicho. She is a powerful, calculating bitch whose head ends up on a stake, nailed to the Aurelian wall. Due to vanity and the lust for power, she had stolen the goddess’s necklace—a clear case of hubris and nemesis. Thus, subversively, the justice of the old pagan gods is still suggestively present. Offend them, and they strike. The patterns of the fiction give back to the gods their ancient respect. The other woman is Urbanilla, the whore; she is streetwise, unthinking, animal. There is a perpetual problem with women in historical fiction, especially fiction that deals with public events. Women did not, could not, act directly within the public sphere. They were excluded from power. What they could do was influence individual men, often in the most underhand way. For many, dishonesty, cunning, and sex were all the weapons they had. It is no coincidence that feminist writers have tended to exploit the territory of science fiction, speculative fiction and utopian fantasy rather than history in our quest to imagine other, different roles for women. In fact, I don’t think women writing historical fiction about men need be any less illuminating than women writing about women, if they do it from a critical, feminist consciousness. And Haasse does. But the point is of general importance. Reinterpreting masculinity in history is a fascinating, subversive thing to do. It may even be a backhanded method of revenging ourselves upon the histories from which women have been so zealously excluded. History is by and large the possession of the masters; the history of others is often lost forever. One solution is to take back the initiative and rewrite theirs. Haasse’s Hadrian is an obsessive, jealous man who has ‘ever but slenderly known himself.’ The search for someone to persecute, the villain he can punish, leads remorselessly back to himself. One of the most haunting, elegiac motifs Haasse uses is Hadrian’s dream. The dream is the key to his betrayals. Memory and conscience are intertwined in Hadrian’s dream. When he understands the meaning of his dream, he will understand himself. In both pagan and Christian traditions, dreams are significant sources of meaning, prophecy, revelation. Hadrian’s dream gives a sinister shape to his doubts and presages his destruction. Fiction is always filled with the satisfying echoes of superstitions justified. Brutal state Christianity may have triumphed in history, but in her fiction Haasse evens up the stakes. What does not change in Haasse’s novel? What do we fi nd instantly recognizable? Some writers maintain that human nature does not change,

Fictions and Histories 59 and I must say it has never been proven that it doesn’t, but human behaviour does—absolutely. Claudian reflects, ‘Over two decades I have seen a world perish, and the birth of something new that is completely alien to me’ (Haasse 1993: 120–21). But the tenements of the poor where he now lives, the squalid hovels where people struggle to survive, these have stayed the same. Poverty and destitution look the same in every age. This is one of the great continuities of history. And as the new prophet predicted, ‘the poor you will have with you always.’ This is an interesting point to make about historical shifts. High politics usually only affects the highly placed. I would be a passionate advocate of the postmodernist theory of discontinuities, if I believed that the dispiriting evidence to the contrary could be ignored. As the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton points out, ‘what strikes a socialist most forcibly about history to date is that it has displayed a most remarkable consistency—namely, the stubbornly persisting realities of wretchedness and exploitation’ (1996: 51). Tolstoy argued that ‘history has for its subject the life of nations and of humanity’ (1982: 1400). But we all write through the filter of our own nation, as the didactic patriotism of War and Peace makes abundantly clear. Kutuzov is the hero of War and Peace because he alone has grasped the significance of the Russian will, the Russian people and the Russian soul. Tolstoy comprehends this because he too is Russian. We make our fictional nations out of the nation or the culture that is written within us. What then makes Haasse’s novel especially Dutch? That I can’t say, as I have so little experience of Dutch writing. But I am quite certain that there will be within the novel’s discourses elements that signal its engagement with Dutch concerns, Dutch desires and fears, Dutch histories and Dutch dreams. I can, however, say what makes it a great novel, a classic in every language. And I hope that I have made a persuasive case. Historical fiction writers often try to explain the gaps in our knowledge of the past. Claudian mysteriously disappeared after 404 AD, and rumours and speculation aside, we don’t know what happened to him. Haasse imagines the end of his story. This work is like restoring the fresco, repainting the gaps. The completed picture is transformed, given other, different meanings. Haasse completes the design, suggesting rather than laboriously reconstructing the rest of the image. The economy of her method, the trial scene, which is intrinsically dramatic in its generation of questions that unleash memory, her use of flashback, fi rst-person confessional storytelling, and shifting the narrative point of view between Claudian and Hadrian— none of these technical methods have ever been associated with the great sagas of classical antiquity: Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, or even Gore Vidal’s Julian. The grand historical narrative is usually an action narrative, which makes no attempt to present a particularly complex inner psychology of character or to investigate its own discourses. Haasse’s novel, in its method and condensed intensity, is a modernist work. Her story is specific to her literary historical moment, as was Tolstoy’s great epic.

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And what are my own views on the relationship of the novelist to history? I think I should probably come clean and say that I do not think history in the sense that Tolstoy argues for History, that indifferent, unfurling force, eerie, inscrutable and irresistible, actually exists. The past is a quilt of traces and texts, ambiguous and often incoherent fragments, out of which we make stories. We make up history as story, and until we do, it does not exist. But the past existed, and we are the proof of its passage. The past is written into us. Novelists are not often professional historians, although many historical novelists will mention on their book jackets and in interviews that they studied history rather than literature. This strategy is intended to assert their authority when dealing with evidence and sources. They seldom reflect upon the fact that their knowledge of literature might be more important for a writer of fiction. But it is rare that a novelist approaching a particular period will be keenly aware of the recent, significant debates in the historiographical scholarship. Historians, apart from those on the madder fringes of psychohistory, seldom describe the inner psychic lives of the people they address. This is the novelist’s territory. We both read the past, play it like a score, but in different registers. Haasse’s fiction and Tolstoy’s epic enter the psychic interiors of their characters, inhabiting a moment of inexorable and terrifying change. These books are republished, reread and remembered because their versions of history are not stage sets, not canvas backdrops of painted exotica, but other countries.

TUDOR AFTERWORD When I fi rst wrote the essay ‘Fictions and Histories’ more than eight years ago, I had read very few historical novels that were not also experiments in form, register and method. High mindedness and high art seemed more significant and satisfying than historical pulp fiction. I still hold this view, but I also believe that a sidelong glance at the world of the best seller might well reveal something more than a sewer of bad prose. Debbie Taylor has a formula for creating a modern, best-selling historical novel in the style of Philippa Gregory, one that will seduce the book clubs and capture the women’s interest market: First choose your historical era. Pick one with exotic costumes, castle settings, royalty as central characters. Now resign from your job and set aside two years to do your research. Seriously: there are no short cuts in the Gregory game. And a word of warning: other authors have begun mining this lucrative seam too, so check out their subject matter before handing in your notice. You’re looking for a misunderstood or overlooked female character whose story is either pivotal to events (Mary Queen of Scots) or intimately caught up in them (Anne Boleyn’s

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sister). Now use the fi rst person to narrate your protagonist’s story. (Taylor 2010: 47) Gregory’s most famous novel to date is, of course, The Other Boleyn Girl, filmed in 2008, starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson.3 I would never have considered this formula useful for writers concerned to create high-minded, complex, exquisitely written literary historical fiction that is searching both in terms of form, style and historical significance. But I have begun to reconsider my position. Here is how it happened. The British nation is labouring under a recent flurry of Tudors. There have been numerous romantic historical fictions working steadily through the six wives of Henry VIII and an endless TV series with the young King Henry jousting, feasting, hunting and whoring his way round the forests and stately homes of England. And into this intoxicating mix of sexual and political intrigue, published to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of Henry’s accession to the throne, fell Hilary Mantel’s massive novel Wolf Hall, which went on to win the 2009 Man Booker Prize. She covers much the same ground as the commercial romance histories but in an entirely different register and with a different bias. Affairs of state dominate the sex lives of her characters, rather than the other way around. Wolf Hall follows the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell and covers five years of Henry’s reign, from the Fall of Cardinal Wolsey to the death of Sir Thomas More. Henry VIII has always enjoyed our favour in novels, plays, soap operas; he was a big man with huge appetites. Thomas More too, both in fictions and histories, has enjoyed a reputation for saintly integrity, as a man of principle who stood up to the king’s bullying and educated his daughters. Mantel creates a revisionist version of them all. More is a fanatical bigot in grubby clothes who keeps an evil table, is responsible for torturing and burning heretics, humiliates his wife in public and belittles women for their stupidity. Cromwell is our hero, and we are encouraged to trust his judgement. The key to Cromwell’s attraction for the reader is the way in which he represents the sceptical hindsight of modernity. His version of internal Christian persecution and dispute is pitiless and cynical. He says to More, who has refused to swear the famous oath of allegiance to the king as head of the Church of England: ‘You call history to your aid. But what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. I have another mirror, I hold it up and it shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will have only the suffering and not your martyr’s gratification’ (Mantel 2010: 566). The modern world jibs a little at self-righteous martyrs. The mirror is a powerful metaphor in the novel. Cromwell’s house is filled with them. Cardinal Wolsey is whitewashed and, once dead, much missed; Mantel represents him as a wise figure embodying loyalty, tolerance and Machiavellian statecraft. The cardinal knows whom to woo and whom

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to kill. King Henry emerges as a monster of capricious inconsistency, cruelty, vanity, lechery and hypochondria—not that he was wrong to fear sudden death. No sooner do we learn to like a particular character, such as Cromwell’s wife Liz, than he or she drops dead of the sweating sickness. Mantel subsumes the descriptive writing into the action or the exchanges between the characters. So Henry Sadler urges Cromwell to stay in Essex, saying, ‘Can’t you stay, you won’t make it to London before they close the gates’ (Mantel 2010: 129). Suddenly, the cramped streets of London as a walled city lurch off the page. This is a concise, modern way of creating an historical period. And Mantel’s method is often clever and amusing. The enraged Duke of Norfolk ‘has been seeing his armourer for a fitting, and is still wearing sundry parts—his cuirass, his garde-reins—so that he looks like an iron pot wobbling to the boil’ (Mantel 2010: 240). In fact, because the narrative and the dramatic action are presented through Cromwell’s eyes and told mostly in the present tense, sometimes through memory, the reader cannot see or reflect upon much that he doesn’t see. She keeps as close as she can to a first-person perspective, without actually shifting her narrative to the slippery, fictive ‘I.’ The lack of an omniscient narrator limits the sensual descriptions Mantel can give the reader. Thus the settings, what a place smelled like, space, texture, the physical geography of Tudor England, remains sparse and hard to grasp. Description, its extent and the density of its texture, is a matter of taste and judgement, and there are some fine passages, especially those evoking the weather in our tiny rainy kingdom. Indeed, the weather is the only thing that seems unchanging, eternal. Hans Holbein, who painted most of the dramatis personae, is a character in the fiction; and this is what Mantel also offers—portraits. The central portrait, and the perceiving consciousness of the novel, is Cromwell, once Wolsey’s man, who eventually takes his master’s place; but she also paints detailed, complex portraits of the Tudor court, all its ambassadors, spies, flunkies, worldly priests, bitchy ladies-in-waiting and embattled, megalomaniac queens. Portraits are created out of character, judgement and interpretation. The events of Tudor history are well known. The main interest is therefore in character and motive: How did this all happen and why? Nobody lives a life in private; Henry’s claustrophobic court is filled with rumour, gossip, tittle-tattle, paranoia and sycophancy. This makes the action utterly absorbing: office politics writ large. Offend the queen, or la grande putain, as the French called Anne Boleyn, and you end up with your head on the block or your feet in the fi re. Mantel locates her action by dates and places, and she also gives us ironic tags as chapter titles, such as ‘Arrange Your Face’ (a wise move in Henry’s presence) and lines from songs, such as ‘Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?’ Much of the action is moved forward through dialogue and debate. The diction is modern but aware of the historical period. The voices are at once recognizable and strange; these people do not think as we do. There are different issues at stake. The religious power struggles of the times take centre stage: Should ordinary people be allowed to read the gospel

Fictions and Histories 63 in English? The Reformation emerges as a savage battleground, where a sceptical opinion or intellectual honesty expressed in the wrong company could kill the person who speaks and everyone who listens. Mantel takes both history and fiction seriously. She knows that her judgement of character and action, the inevitable partiality of fiction— whose voice do we hear? who claims our sympathy and attention?—and her fictional methods inform her meanings and the significance we attribute to her reading of events. Cromwell is her hero and Anne Boleyn a scheming bitch, albeit a fascinating one, who is as desperate for power as he is. But what struck me, returning to the formula for best-selling success, are the similarities between Mantel’s structure, theme and approach and the ‘Gregory formula’ for popular historical romance. Pick an historical era everybody knows, that of the Tudors. Go for exotic settings and royalty. Rework the figure of Anne Boleyn, created again and again by women romance writers, but ring the changes just a little, watch her from the masculine perspective. And as for fi rst-person narrative, Mantel sticks so closely to Thomas Cromwell’s point of view that the reader feels as menaced and insecure as he does in the Tudor court, where power and influence are hard to get and harder to hold. Therefore, that innocent formula for successful historical fiction is stronger than it at fi rst appears. The central character must already be something of a blank in history, with few sources to detail him or her, who can therefore be reinvented, reimagined. What distinguishes Mantel’s sophisticated novel from the romance histories is not only her technique and method, or the canny strangeness of her dialogue, but also the re-visioning of well-known characters. King Henry is no longer the hero; neither is Thomas More, and Anne Boleyn, who in other histories (De Groot 2010: 74) is cast as either abused heroine or politically ambitious whore, is here refracted through Cromwell’s consciousness. The difference of view changes the story, its meaning and significance. How alien does Mantel’s version of the Tudor past seem to us? Sarah Dunant, a best-selling romance novelist who also lays frequent claims to her history degree, argues that ‘our thirst for celebrity and soap opera has largely swallowed up Henry VIII and the rest of the Tudor gang. The idea behind this kind of drama is broadly that although it was a long time ago, human beings largely remain the same, and their emotions—rage, love, hatred, revenge, lust—make them easily identifiable’ (Dunant 2009). This is, I’m afraid, the ‘history enables us to see essential truths more clearly’ school of fiction. Dunant counters this banal and comforting version of unchanging human nature with the argument I have used previously, that is, in the richest rewritings of history, the past becomes another country: But there is another way of looking at history, one that becomes fiercer and wilder the further back you go; one that says that people in the past, thanks to radically different physical, political, religious and cultural situations, may be almost unrecognisable to their modern counterparts. (Dunant 2009)

64 Patricia Duncker This is, in part, clearly nonsense. Deliberate, considered genocide on an industrial scale was invented in the twentieth century. I can think of few fiercer and wilder historical periods in the dark continent of Europe than the one my mother’s generation has lived through. For the fact is that, although we may not currently disembowel human beings as a common method of execution in England and stick their heads upon the town gates or Tower Bridge (as was Thomas Cromwell’s fate), in Tudor times we slaughtered, tortured, starved and vaporized our fellow human beings in numbers unimaginable. History is created through argument, evidence, imaginative reconstruction, and judicious interpretation. Historical fiction, however, has to convince, persuade and entrap the reader into that willing suspension of disbelief that would never be the project of an historian. An historian interprets the evidence but would also assume the evidence speaks for itself, and allow it to do so. Perhaps, in the end, questions of loyalty and betrayal decide the day: An historian should never betray her sources; the novelist should never forget her loyalty to the reader.

NOTES The fi rst section of this chapter is reproduced from Writing on the Wall: Selected Essays by Patricia Duncker (Ontario: Pandora, 2002). 1. For a readable assault on the postmodernists, see Evans (1997). 2. See Dworkin (1987: 4–20) for a radical analysis of Tolstoy’s tale. 3. For an overview of the narratives dealing with Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall, see De Groot (2010: 67–78).

REFERENCES De Groot, J. 2010. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge. Dunant, S. 2009. ‘Sinner and Saint.’ Guardian Review, 4 July 2009. Dworkin, A. 1987. Intercourse. London: Secker and Warburg. Eagleton, T. 1996. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Evans, R. J. .1997. In Defence of History. London: Granta. Haasse, H. S. 1993. Threshold of Fire: A Novel of Fifth Century Rome. Translated by A. Miller and N. Blinstrub. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers. Originally published as Een Nieuwer Testament, 1964. Macherey, P. 1966. 1978. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mantel, H. 2009. Wolf Hall. London: HarperCollins, Fourth Estate. Taylor, D. 2010. ‘How to Write a Best Seller: The White Queen by Philippa Gregory.’ Mslexia 47 (Oct./Nov./Dec.). Tolstoy, L. 1982. War and Peace. Translated by R. Edmonds. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Troyat, H. 1965. 1980. Tolstoy. Translated by N. Amphoux. New York: Harmony.

5

The Evil that Men Do Lives after Them, and the Good Is Oft Interred within Their Bones Emily Sutherland

Can a novelist be guilty of defamation when portraying an historical character in a work of fiction? It is traditionally accepted that we should not speak ill of the dead because they are not able to defend themselves. This precept, enshrined in common parlance, is ethically defensible as a principle of justice and reinforced in our legal code. While the laws of defamation and slander protect the reputations of the living, they also extend to the families of those who have died, but again, this is to protect the reputations of the living. Should the concept of protecting a person’s reputation also apply to those who are long dead? Can we owe integrity to the living, but not to the dead? Biographers are constrained, to a large extent, by the need to confi ne themselves to what can be established. Although biographers may offer explanations concerning their subjects’ motivations or psychological states, any conjecture they make about the character or personality of the subject will relate to accepted facts. Historical novelists, on the other hand, are freer to surmise, suggest or make claims about the historical persons portrayed in their novels. Events and conversations are created in a novel or play by the author, who may then claim immunity from the requirement to strictly adhere to the truth because it is fiction. The person they depict was a living person about whom certain facts are known, and who has for one reason or another remained of interest to following generations. Often the novel includes a peritext with the statement that although almost every person depicted in the book actually lived, the work itself must be treated as fiction. Surely there is an inherent contradiction in this statement. A notice on the foot of a ski lift claiming that the owners take no responsibility for the safety of those who ride it does not exonerate the owners from a duty of care to maintain their equipment so it is safe. In the same way, the statement that a book is based on real people and real events but is basically fiction does not necessarily allow the writer to depict such people and events in a manner that distorts and twists their character beyond that which might be defensible. Under the basic principles of common law, defamation is traditionally defi ned as follows:

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Emily Sutherland The publication of any false imputation concerning a person, or a member of his family, whether living or dead, by which (a) the reputation of that person is likely to be injured or (b) he is likely to be injured in his profession or trade or (c) other persons are likely to be induced to shun, avoid, ridicule or despise him. (The New Manual)

The conditions under which a person may sue for defamation of character are relatively straightforward. They apply to all published words about a person that are intended to be read either by sight, touch or hearing, as long as the identity of the person is clear and ordinary people would understand the meaning of the words. Living people have a concrete identity. Their lives, achievements and activities may be documented and interpreted. Truth is not always a defence against the laws of defamation. It may be necessary to show that not only is the injurious comment true but that it is in the public interest to reveal it. Thus the laws of defamation would apply to biographers, and they and their publishers are aware of this. Writers of fiction need not be concerned with the laws of defamation and slander if the characters they create are totally fictional, and often they make the disclaimer that any resemblance to a person now living, or who has lived, is purely coincidental. The question still arises, however: is it possible to defame, malign or slander in a work of fiction a person who once lived? A fictional character may not have lived in the material world, but a fictional character does have an identity. That identity is an abstract concept, not identical to the identity of a material person. How the nature of this fictional identity is understood, however, impinges on our understanding of the identity of historical characters depicted in novels that are defi ned as fiction, although the text includes the representation of real events and people. For this reason I wish to examine the nature of an identity that may defi ne fictional characters. Following this I wish to examine what form of identity can be imposed on an historical character who is clearly identifiable when he or she is depicted in fiction. Amie Thomasson (1999) describes fictional characters as dependent entities in her theory of author essentialism. They are dependent on the author who creates them, dependent on the text in which they are described, and dependent on a reader who is able to both linguistically and culturally comprehend this text. These elements ensure that the identity of a fictional character, once created by one author, keeps that identity even when taken up by another author. As Thomasson explains: Once created, clearly a fictional character can go on existing without its author or his or her creative acts, for it is preserved in literary works that may long outlive their author. (1999: 7) Thomasson gives examples of characters, such as Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Fielding’s Pamela, who have appeared in the works of authors apart

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from their original creators. The identity of these characters is not changed even when they appear in a text written by another author. We could consider the many reincarnations of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy that appear in various novels and films although the reader or viewer immediately relates them to the characters originally created by Jane Austen. As stated earlier, the theory of author essentialism requires three conditions to be fulfilled to establish an identity for fictional characters. The fi rst two are the text and its composition. Thomasson outlines these: As ‘text’ I mean a sequence of symbols in a language (or languages); by ‘composition’ I mean roughly the text as created by a certain author in certain historical circumstances; by ‘literary work’ I mean roughly the novel, poem, short story or so forth having certain aesthetic and artistic qualities and ordinarily telling a tale concerning various characters and events. (1999: 64) The work (text) of an author that is produced as a composition requires a third factor—a reader. Thomasson summarizes readers as ‘a certain community of individuals with the right language capabilities and background assumptions to read and understand the literary work’ (1999: 65). There have been critics of Thomasson’s theory. Harry Deutsch considers it is ‘absurd’ to claim that two persons could not independently ‘create the same allographic work’ (2000: n141). To my mind, it is bizarre to imagine two authors creating an identical character, perhaps while sitting next to a row of chimpanzee tapping out Shakespeare’s plays on their word processors. Two authors may have a similar idea for a character, but it does stretch credulity to consider that they would produce identical characters, with the same names, locations and backstories. Jeffrey Goodman, in his support of author essentialism and in refutation of fictional antidescriptivism, highlights the absurdity, maintaining that ‘in the chimp world, there is a duplicate story copy of the Doyle-produced copy of A Study in Scarlet’ (2005: 204). This is not the place to develop in detail all the arguments for and against Thomasson’s theory, except to say that her theory does have value in the way that it establishes a basis on which to judge fictional characters and, by extension, historical characters in fiction. The three criteria give weight not only to the text but also to the writer and the reader. They form a trio, each of which interacts with the other, in order to allow a defi ned identity. If any one criterion is missing, the principles required to establish identity have not been met. Thomasson asserts that her theory allows comparison and discussion of fictional characters, and in doing so, she inadvertently refers to the problem of depicting historical characters: But the presence of some fuzzy cases in which any decisions seem arbitrary does not mean that the concept of identity is inapplicable to

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Emily Sutherland fictional characters. . . . What is significant is that criteria have been developed. . . . that offer rigid sufficient conditions for identity, as well as a necessary condition for identity. (1999: 69)

The ‘fuzzy’ cases might well include a character who has lived and therefore has a material identity but whose character is developed within a work of fiction. In reply to an email sent to Amy Thomasson asking if her theory could be applied to historical characters in fiction, she replied: I tend to think that we, in different contexts, want to speak about these cases in different ways. In some contexts (those I focus on in F&M) it is important to note the author’s references back to the real world, to actual people, places and events and we will speak about (the real) Nixon as appearing in (and re-characterized in certain ways in) a novel. In other contexts though, e.g., if we are saying what a well developed (or underdeveloped) character Nixon or Napoleon is in a novel, we seem to speak of it as we would of other purely fictional characters. . . . In these contexts of discussion I think we can take ourselves to be referring to a created fictional character. (2005) The ‘author’s reference to the real world’ that grounds the historical characters in their world is important. At the same time the historical character, although part of the real world, may be thought of as ‘appearing’ in a novel or film, both creative works developed through the imagination of the writer or film director. The diagram of linguistic communication devised by Roman Jakobson gives us another view of the relationship between author, text and reader.

ADDRESSER

–

CODE MESSAGE CONTACT CONTEXT

–

ADDRESSEE

Raman Selden states that although this diagram may be interpreted as a literary discourse being ‘set to the message,’ we may instead adopt the perspective of the reader or audience, in which case the whole orientation of the diagram changes. The text has no real existence until it is read (Selden 1989: 115). This interpretation relates to Thomasson’s criteria of author/ text/reader and includes the knowledge or code and the way in which it is received. This returns us to prescription in the definition of defamation, that the written word may induce others to ‘shun, avoid, ridicule or despise’ a person. If the depiction of an historical character produces any of these reactions from readers, can this depiction be classed as defamation? More important, would this depiction be an unjust act?

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It may be timely to ask ourselves if the idea of defaming historical persons who may have lived hundreds of years ago is nothing more than an intellectual exercise. Although their reputations may be injured and others may ‘shun or ridicule’ them, they are not going to rise from the grave and demand retribution and exoneration. Some historic people have so captured the imagination or been regarded as inspiring that there are now societies formed to perpetuate their memories and laud them. In other cases there may be descendants who feel sufficiently aggrieved to take action, but this might only be relevant to historical people from the recent past. During the famous Rasputin trial in 1934, the Russian Princess Irina Youssoupoff sued Metro Goldwyn Mayor because of the way they had portrayed her in Rasputin and the Empress, a fi lm about the death of Rasputin. In the fi lm it was suggested that the princess was seduced by the monk. After losing the case MGM subsequently showed the fi lm with the statement ‘This fi lm bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.’ Had Princess Youssoupoff died before the fi lm was screened, her family may have been entitled to sue MGM. This right would have extended to any descendants, assuming they could show that the fi lm had an impact on their reputations. It is reasonable to assume that, except in very exceptional cases, a time limit would be established so one could not claim that harm had been done to a person whose very distant ancestor had been defamed, but it is not totally outside the realm of possibility. On the other hand, in the afterword to King’s Captain, (set in the late 1700s) Dewey Lambdin writes: Whether Proby really believed the sentiments I gave him (for dramatic effect) I do not know, and I’ll thank his family to keep a cool head and lose the phone number of their solicitors if I portrayed him as more romantic or mystic than he really was. Evan Nepean’s descendants too. (2000: 353) The idea of representing with integrity an historical person in fiction does not assume that the portrait of that person will be a totally favourable presentation. It does assume that it does not contain falsehood or unnecessary vilification. This, in turn, means that person will not be defamed, slandered or maligned. If, however, we are confident that the portrayal will never result in legal action, does it matter how this portrayal is framed? Are there other moral and ethical issues that come into play apart from legal considerations, concepts such as the virtue of justice? I would argue that it is a just act to write truthfully about a person, whenever he or she may have lived. Conversely, to portray a person in an unfavourable light when there is no factual justification to do so is, in my opinion, an injustice. In support of such a statement, I wish to examine the nature of justice and integrity more closely.

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Justice is one of the cardinal virtues. The others are temperance, fortitude and prudence. The practice of a particular virtue rarely stands alone, and so it is with justice. The word ‘prudence’ in modern day use is more usually considered reactionary caution. In older times it was seen as the virtue that was the foundation upon which all other virtues rested. To be prudent meant that before acting, a person carefully considered all the possible ramifications of that action. How apt this is for justice, which involves ascertaining what is a person’s right or entitlement. It is distinguished from charity, benevolence and generosity because justice presupposes that a claim for something may be made. No one can claim alms as a right, but they may claim what they consider their right to property or position in the name of justice. André Comte-Sponville writes that justice hinges on a twofold respect, ‘a respect for legality in the polis and for equality among individuals’ (Comte-Sponville 2003: 63). I shall look at the question of equality of individuals in more detail, but at this point I would like to further examine justice. Justice enshrines integrity. A person who has integrity respects truth. For example, a scientist who has integrity does not copy or claim the work of others. A person who has integrity does not give false testimony in a court of law. A person with integrity is one who can be trusted. A person with integrity will seek to always act in a just manner. The concept of justice has been with us for centuries, and the understanding of what it means has developed over that period. As Alasdair McIntyre points out: The Aristotelian account of justice and of practical rationality emerges from the conflicts of the ancient polis, but is then developed by Aquinas in a way which escapes the limitations of the polis. So the Augustinian version of Christianity entered in the medieval period into complex relationships of antagonism, later of synthesis, and then of continuing antagonism to Aristotelianism. So in quite a different later cultural context Augustinian Christianity, now in a Calvinist form, and Aristotelianism, now in a Renaissance version, entered into a new symbiosis in seventeenth-century Scotland, so engendering a tradition which at its climax of achievement was subverted from within by Hume. And so fi nally modern liberalism, born of antagonism to all tradition, has transformed itself gradually into what is clearly recognisable even to some of its adherents as one more tradition. (1988: 10) So when we attempt to apply the principle of justice and integrity to a specific case, particularly one that entails the depiction of a person who lived many years ago, maybe hundreds of years ago, tradition and cultural aspects may be relevant. We should consider people and their actions within the framework of their society and period and assess their actions within this framework. It does not, however, alter the basic principle that we should act with justice towards all people.

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Defamation is against the law, so that to defame someone is to offend against the ‘legality in the polis.’ In reference to Comte-Sponville’s second respect, ‘equality among individuals,’ justice is akin to righteousness or integrity. It includes the concept of impartiality as well as adherence to rules, or as Aristotle has said, ‘treating equals equally and non-equals unequally but in proportion to their relative difference’ (Benn Peters 1967: 301). Any ‘unequal treatment’ must be explained and qualified. Benn and Peters explain that the Aristotelian principle has two distinct prescriptions: The fi rst is the requirement that a law should be a law; exceptions should not be made unless relevant grounds are produced. But the second is the requirement that there should be categories—e.g., categories created by law—and the problem is to determine what are relevant grounds for determining such categories. (1959: 114) This quote highlights the concept that within categories or distinct groups, justice enshrined in law applies to all people. The idea that all humans are equal does not mean that all humans are the same in abilities, opportunities and character. Given these differences there is still an element shared by all people that distinguishes them from other forms of life or nonliving matter. Arguments about the nature of this universal and unifying essence have been waged even before medieval times when William of Champeaux and Abelard were battling it out in the French cathedral schools. The unifying element means there is some basis by which all people may claim equality, and it is this element that also allows us to claim basic human rights. Protection of a person’s good name is one of the rights enshrined in article 12 of the Universal Declaration Human Rights (1948): ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’ The fact that a person lived two hundred, five hundred or even thousands of years ago does not deny them the right to be treated with justice and integrity. The importance of honour and having a good name hearkens back to the earliest historical periods. That good name can be lost in a number of ways, as Dante reminds us in the Divine Comedy: ‘The reputation which the world bestows is like the wind that shifts now here, now there, its name changed with the quarter whence it blows’ (canto 11, l. 100). In Shakespeare’s Othello, Cassio states, ‘O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial’ (act 11, sc. 3). One’s ‘immortal part’ may well refer to all that remains in this world after death—one’s reputation. Well before the time of Shakespeare or Dante, gossip and rumour that destroyed reputations was personified as a woman in the figure of Fama.

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In Metamorphoses, Ovid describes her as inhabiting a place at the centre of the Earth where: All things, everywhere, however far, are scanned and watched and every voice and word reaches listening ears. . . . Thousands, false and mixed with true, roam to and fro And words flit by and phrases all confused Some pour their tattle into idle ears, Some pass on what they’ve gathered, and as each Gossip adds something new the story grows. (Ovid 1986: XII, 52–59) Rumours and gossip abound, and reputations are lost in confusion and falsehood. The concepts of honour and good reputation were the lynchpin of the chivalric code. Death was to be sought before dishonour. A person’s word was his bond, and to lose one’s good reputation was to be in the invidious position of becoming a social outcast. This is why people could sue to regain their good reputation. Elizabeth I of England was well aware of the damage that slander and libel could do to her reputation and sought to protect her image. Keith Botelho tells us that ‘Elizabeth took steps to secure her reputation within the realm of England and abroad, seeking to establish an authorized image of herself at a historical moment when monarchs were concerned with how they were to appeal to the world’ (2009: 22). One of the steps Elizabeth took to establish and preserve her reputation was to issue ‘a broad array of royal proclamations that sought to penalize or contain rumours that flew swiftly throughout the realm’ (Botelho 2009: 21). These proclamations referred to both oral and written slander. Fama had a dual role as rumour and reputation, the latter often ruined by the former. Novelists who write historical fiction may always claim that although their story is based on real events and people, it must still be considered as fiction. Surely this is claiming the best of both worlds because any inaccuracies or distortions can be claimed as ‘fiction,’ yet being based on real events and people, who are fascinating in their own right, enhances the text. The reader’s interest and attention is aroused because the book deals with people and events that are not fictional. It is ingenuous to assume that obvious similarities to a person or events are coincidence. Donna Lee Brien makes this point very tellingly in her examination of the way in which the Nick Enright plays The Property of the Clan and Blackrock and the fi lm based on the latter mirror the events surrounding the rape and murder of the schoolgirl Leigh Leigh. In 1997 Enright denied that he based his work on anything but the broadest outline of the case, which he had seen reported in the newspapers. The similarities, as Brien’s analysis reveals, point to more than a broad similarity. The audience of these plays or the fi lm would be excused for drawing the

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conclusion that the murder of Leigh Leigh formed the basis of the plot, and Enright must have been aware of this. Brien, however, does not criticize Enright. His problem was ‘not how or why he wrote these works. It was, instead, how audiences read and understood not only his texts but also his intention, and how he, in turn, responded to these public perceptions once they were aired’ (Brien 2009: 4). Citing Walton’s opinion that ‘readers of nonfiction works such as biography or history . . . engage with those works principally because they are seeking some biographical or historical truth,’ she concludes: Recognition of such audience/reader behaviour and motivation underscores how much more care Enright and the producers of his plays could have taken when they undoubtedly drew upon real events to enhance dramatic values of their public, albeit fictional objects of entertainment. (2009: 5) I would suggest that Enright and his producers not only could have taken more care but that they should have done so. It may be that Enright was not initially aware of how closely his plays mirrored real events or how the young men who were accused and tried for the rape and murder of the Leigh Leigh were identified with the characters in the plays. It is difficult to conclude that he never considered this possibility. In any case, the reaction of the viewers would have surely been that the plays or film revealed something about the Leigh Leigh murder and subsequent police investigation, and consequently, to have made judgments about people involved in this case accordingly. E. D. Hirsch questions whether an author can mean something he did not mean: It is not possible to mean what one does not mean, though it is very possible to mean what one is not conscious of meaning. . . . No example of an author’s ignorance with respect to his meaning could legitimately show that his intended meaning and the meaning of his text are two different things. (1967: 22) This suggests that an author is conscious of the effect that the portrayal of a character produces on readers. It brings up the notion of a foreseeable consequence for which a person may be held responsible. What a writer intended to mean might not always be how the reader or audience, as independent entities, interpret the text, but writers may not absolve themselves completely, especially if an interpretation is not extreme or far-fetched. Hirsh explains that ‘no textual meaning can transcend the meaning possibilities and the control of language in which it is expressed’ because the text is language bound (1967: 23). However, he also places meaning within the realm of the readers’ consciousness:

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Emily Sutherland Meaning is an affair of consciousness and not of physical signs or things. Consciousness is, in turn, an affair of persons, and in textual interpretation the persons involved are an author and a reader. The meanings that are actualized by the reader are either shared with the author or belong to the reader alone. (1967: 23)

Given that the writer is, or should be, aware that the reader may interpret the meaning of the text in ways that belong to the reader alone, to what extent can a writer be held responsible for readers’ interpretations? Brien has suggested that the writer certainly has to be aware of the implications about events that are depicted if they closely match real events. In the same way writers need to be aware that their depiction of historical characters— that is, ‘real people’—will influence the way the readers judge and interpret these characters. Given that writers are wordsmiths, using subtle ways to introduce and develop a character, readers can be led to draw certain conclusions about a person without ever being fully conscious of how they have been influenced by a text. Human behaviour is complex, able to be perceived in a number of ways depending on the points of view of those making the observations. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. One person’s war hero may be another person’s war criminal. One person’s saint may be another’s persecutor. It is as much a distortion to write a hagiography as it is to vilify a person, and I would argue each does the person an injustice. To vilify a person, however, is also take his or her good name away, and this must be considered the greater injustice. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is based on the life of Thomas Cromwell up to the time that Anne Boleyn is executed and Henry VIII is about to take Jane Seymour as his next wife. Thomas More is a minor but very important character in this story. Rather than the saintly and wise Thomas many would expect after reading certain biographies or becoming acquainted with him through the play or the fi lm A Man for all Seasons by Robert Bolt, Mantel depicts him, largely through the reactions and observations of Thomas Cromwell, as a narrow-minded and nasty man, given to spouting propaganda: Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money. (Mantel 2009: 87) Or a man who parades his religiosity: Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a small scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell’s, is that

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somebody makes these instruments of daily torture. . . . He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs. (Mantel 2009: 87) Enter Thomas More ‘ambling along, always genial, shabby’ with a grubby shirt collar, tireless in his pursuit of heretics and not too fastidious about the language he uses: More in his pamphlets against Luther calls the German shit. He says that his mouth is like the world’s anus. You would not think that such words would proceed from Thomas More, but they do. No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene. (Mantel 2009: 121) Perhaps Thomas More is, at least, a devoted husband and father? Mantel, through Thomas Cromwell, cannot give him even this. More’s home life is mocked, the family imagined as the ideal in Holbein’s portrait, but ‘in real life there is something fraying about their host, a suspicion of unravelling weave’ (2009: 227). Even More’s purchase of a carpet reveals his lack of judgement. At worst the carpet is two carpets pieced together. At best it has been woven by the village’s Pattison or patched together last year by Venetian slaves in a backstreet workshop. . . . It’s beautiful, he [Cromwell] says, not wanting to spoil his pleasure. But next time, he thinks, take me with you. (Mantel 2009: 228) Alice, Thomas More’s second wife, presides at the dinner table but can take no part in the conversation, which is exclusively in Latin. More comments that ‘a glance at Alice frees me from the stain of concupiscence’ (Mantel 2009: 230). The story of how he presented his daughter-in-law Anne with a box of peas that she believed, at first, to be the pearls she had craved, is told with much merriment and with no concern for the young woman’s discomfiture. Cromwell remarks later that as Anne had an independent income of a hundred a year, you’d think she could have a string of pearls. Perhaps the greatest indictment against More is the accusation that he tortured people. For example, his plan for the Franciscan friars who are ferrying letters abroad for Catherine of Aragon: If I take them and if I cannot persuade them, and you know that I am very persuasive, into confi rming my suspicion, I may have to hang them up by their wrists, and start a sort of contest between them, as to which one will emerge fi rst into better sense. (Mantel 2009: 459) In More’s fi nal years of imprisonment, trial and execution Mantel shows him in a more favourable light, although he is still wily, still the able and proud scholar, a man who has prepared for death. Thomas Cromwell shows

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him a certain sympathy and consideration, but More consistently refuses to take the king’s oath, effectively signing his execution order. We must remember that Thomas Cromwell is the focus of Wolf Hall, and in the character of Thomas More, Mantel has created a foil to reveal Cromwell’s personality. In this has she destroyed the good reputation and respect that More appears to have enjoyed in his lifetime and that has been held by many people ever since? In his book Thomas More, John Guy has attempted to come to a defi nitive conclusion as to who the ‘real’ Thomas More was. After a careful and thorough examination of all available sources, including the works of More himself, he concludes: Now that I have fi nished this book, I no longer believe that a truly historical biography of Thomas More can be written. The sources are too problematic. Historians cannot legitimately ‘invent’ what amounts to a relatively high proportion of their facts, while undue conjecture irritates the reader. . . . We need to see with greater clarity not only the different portrayals that have arisen to debate Thomas More, but to recognize the limits of what we can and cannot know about him. (2000: xi) The acknowledgement that without sufficient foundation an historical biography cannot be written is, in itself, a statement of integrity. If an historian cannot legitimately invent Thomas More, does a novelist have that right? There are some established facts about More’s life, and it would appear, on reading Guy, that his biographers differ more about why he took certain actions rather than when or if he indeed took these actions. Did he, for example, ever wish to be ordained as a priest? And if so, did he decide against it because he found the idea of celibacy too difficult? Was his second marriage to Alice, entered into just a month after his fi rst wife’s death, due to his high degree of lust or to provide stability for his household? Was he dragged into political and public life against his will, on the insistence of Henry VIII, or was he a highly ambitious man? Possibly the strongest criticism of him is his zeal in hunting down and punishing heretics. Guy reminds us that More was ‘set to the anti-Lutheran campaign by Henry VIII’ and he concludes: The schizophrenia created by More’s dual roles as author of Utopia and inquisitor in heresy cases will never be dispelled. It is too deeply ingrained and no fi nal reconciliation is possible on the available historical evidence. (2000: 122) From the information that we have Thomas More may not be as wise and saintly as some have portrayed him, although these portrayals are often tempered by religious or political considerations. However, he does appear

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to be a far more admirable and ethical character than the one portrayed in Wolf Hall. In his biography of More, Peter Ackroyd writes: Here we come close to one of the complexities on More’s life and career. He lived in the spiritual world as well as the secular world. In the former he practised individual prayer and penitence, while in the latter he derived his identity from the social hierarchy in which he found himself. (1998: 215) Instead of the arrogant husband and father portrayed by Mantel, Ackroyd refers to More as being a ‘model of tact’ (1998: 227), especially in his dealing with William Roper who married his daughter Margaret. Ackroyd admits that More ‘was not averse to mocking the size of his wife’s nose, although his own was not inconsiderable’ (1998: 253), and the gift of peas rather than pearls to Anne Cresace is mentioned, although Ackroyd then states that ‘the story may not be reliable, since Anne Cresacre is wearing a necklace of real pearls in the Holbein sketch’ (1998: 524). Mantel makes much of Thomas More’s treatment of heretics and dissenters. There is an account of the whipping imposed on a young boy, Dick Purser, for spoken sacrilege: It was that he laid my flesh bare. And the women looking on. Dame Alice. The young girls . . . I thought one of them might speak up for me, but when they saw me unbreached, I only disgusted them. It made them laugh. While the fellow was whipping me, they were laughing. (Mantel 2009: 639) This is a horrible scene, designed to make the reader recoil in distaste, not only from Thomas More, but from his whole household. Ackroyd does not shy away from the persecution of heretics, outlining the measures More took after 1531: He [More] approved of burning, therefore, and in that respect was no different from most of his contemporaries. . . . So his actions were not exceptional, and it might be argued that his severe stance was a reaction to the menaces of the period. (1998: 297) To portray Thomas More as a sadistic voyeur who took pleasure from observing the sufferings of those he perceived to be heretics is to go far beyond reliable accounts. At that time, defending the Catholic Church was a religious and secular obligation. We must see historical events in the context of their time. It is not apt to judge the past in the same way as the present. It must be seen in its own terms and values if we are to understand it with any depth. As George MacDonald Fraser reminds us: ‘You cannot,

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must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values if you are to have any inkling of it’ (MacDonald Fraser 2010). In other words, without having an understanding and appreciation of the past, it is impossible to make a reasoned assessment concerning the people who lived then. More did regard heretics who refused to recant as being beyond salvation and worthy of punishment, and he acted accordingly. In doing this he reflected the attitudes of the times. Mantel is justified in highlighting the animosity between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, given both the similarities and the differences in their backgrounds and their similar ambitions. There was bound to be a sense of rivalry. Both had been close to Cardinal Wolseley, and both had been called into the service of the king, but there could only be one Lord Chancellor. Did Mantel exaggerate this animosity? Ackroyd, in describing Cromwell’s dealings with More after he had been consigned to the Tower refers to him as trying to ‘kill More with kindness, professing the benevolent intentions of a king who would be willing to show mercy and allow his old servant to be “abrode in the worlde agayne among other men”’ (Ackroyd 1998: 375). This gentle kindness did not prevent Cromwell pursuing the matter of Thomas More and drawing the king’s attention again to More’s refusal to sign the oath. Mantel does show a softer Cromwell when More is close to his fi nal defeat: The man’s [More’s] tone, the emptiness, the loss: it goes straight to his heart. He turns away, to keep his reply calm and trite. ‘You have only to say some words. That’s all.’ ‘Ahh. Just words’. ‘And if you don’t want to say them I can put them to you in writing. Sign your name and the king will be happy. I will send my barge to row you back to Chelsea and tie up at the end of the wharf at the end of your own garden.’ (Mantel 2009: 591). Does Mantel wish us to believe that Cromwell is sincere? The ensuing conversation suggests that he is, that Cromwell wants More to ‘have every opportunity to live to rethink his position, show loyalty to our king, and go home’ (Mantel 2009: 594). This would also, although it was not stated specifically, win the king’s gratitude for Cromwell. The line between character portrayal for dramatic effect and character assassination is a fi ne one and one that is very difficult to defi ne. Writers of historical novels or scriptwriters of films dealing with historical characters are creative artists, with all that implies. The paramount importance is to create a stimulating, thought-provoking piece of work that is dramatic enough to hold the readers’ or viewers’ attention. Strict historical accuracy may be sacrificed for the writer to get inside the hearts and minds of people who lived in the past so that people who are alive today can relate

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to them. Fiction and history melt and meld into each other. Might not writers be allowed the same flexibility in portraying historical characters as they are in describing events and conversations that are pure fiction? Is there still a responsibility to characterize historical people in the spirit of justice and truth even if this is to the detriment of the themes and character development? In Wolf Hall, Mantel, possibly faced with the difficulty of sorting the few facts from the many fanciful ‘truths,’ has opted, as Guy explains do many of More’s biographers, to ‘privilege one set of disputed “facts” over their alternatives for fear of contradicting a shibboleth, or else they have preferred one particular version of the story because it suits their purpose’ (Guy 2000: x). If this is the case, her purpose appears to be to portray Thomas More in a very negative light. This may seem irrelevant, considering that he lived hundreds of years ago and is long past caring about the world’s opinion. Apart from the principle of justice, who could be affronted by such a portrayal? Today More still has a strong following. Guy writes that although More may not be a man for all seasons, he is certainly a man for all purposes: Canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius X in May 1935, he is also the hero of the former Soviet Union, where an obelisk was sculptured on Lenin’s orders after the Revolution. . . . If the English people were set a test to justify their history and civilization by the example of one man, then it is Sir Thomas More whom they would perhaps choose. . . . Most spectacularly, More played the role of moral paragon at the outset of the impeachment trial of President Clinton on 14 January 1999. (Guy 2000: ix) Further evidence that Thomas More is still honoured and revered is found in the large number of Thomas More societies, usually based in universities, all over the English-speaking world. These are serious organizations with eminent patrons, which confer prestigious awards. To them Thomas More is a man to be emulated, not despised. Would they be affronted by Mantel’s representation of their hero, or would they, on reading her portrayal, now shun and despise him before disbanding their societies? One way to gauge possible reader response to a book is to read the reviews. In the case of Wolf Hall the emphasis, naturally, is on Thomas Cromwell, but the other Thomas nearly always rates a mention. Christopher Taylor writes: More emerges as Cromwell’s opposite number, more a spokesman for another worldview than a practical antagonist. Shabbily dressed, genial, yet punctiliously correct on politically controversial points, this More is a far cry from Bolt’s gentle humanist martyr. He’s made repulsive even more by the self-adoring theatricality behind his modest

80 Emily Sutherland exterior than by his interest in torturing heretics and contemptuous treatment of his wife. He ends up stage-managing his own destruction out of narcissism and fanaticism, or at best a cold idealism that’s contrasted unfavourably with Cromwell’s reforming worldliness. (Guardian, 2 May 2009) In the New York Review of Books, Stephen Greenblatt writes: Cromwell fi nds More’s ascetic spirituality, his taste for hairshirts and self-flagellation, repellent, and he loathes More’s fraudulent urbanity, ‘his ability to make his twisted jokes, but not take them.’ The More of Wolf Hall is not Robert Bolt’s principled man for all seasons; he is the man who wished to have the words ‘terrible to heretics’ carved in his epitaph, who attempted to set up an English Inquisition, who chained and interrogated suspected Protestants in his own house in Chelsea, who sent men and women to the stake. (5 November 2009) In the Times Review, Vanora Bennett writes: Readers may also be shocked by Mantel’s hostility to the Catholic Thomas More. Cromwell eventually replaces More as Chancellor, once Catholicism goes out of fashion and More refuses to drop his faith. Cromwell’s men then bring about More’s downfall. Having written my own fictional (and negative) Thomas More, I was interested in how she characterised him. Mantel cuts More no slack. Whether people love him or hate him—he’s a saint to Catholics, while Protestants tend to regard him as a torturer—on the whole they give him credit for nurturing a loving family. Mantel doesn’t give him even that. Her More is a cold fish who weds a woman he can’t love, then torments her for years. (25 April 2009) Dennis Glover, writing in the Australian Literary Review, suggests that Mantel had two reasons for ‘ripping the halo from More’s head’: First, More was far from the heroic defender of democratic liberty Bolt made him out to be. . . . Second, by choosing martyrdom, More chose the easy way out. As a believer in the afterlife, his death was of little personal consequence. (3 February 2010) Hilary Mantel establishes both conflict and contrast between Cromwell and More. However, they resemble each other in a number of ways, including their profession, their mastery of rhetoric and their ambition to advance in the service the king. Their antagonism to each other highlights their differences: More the man of religion who accepts the authority of the church, the last of the medievalists; Cromwell the pragmatist, supporting

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religious and intellectual freedom. Wolf Hall was well received by critics and won the Man Booker Prize, and as literature it is a fi ne work, fully deserving the prize and accolades. In writing it, has the author done a major injustice to a prominent historical figure? Mantel is not alone in presenting an historical figure in an excessively critical light. The alleged hunchback murderer of young princes, Richard III has suffered at the hands of many writers. Josephine Tey, in The Daughter of Time, provides evidence of research that contradicts this view of the English king. There are Richard III societies that also seek to repair the damage done to the king’s reputation, although this has not yet been a resounding success, as evidenced by the following, written by Wendy E. A. Moorhen, the research officer of the Richard III Society: Within a few years of its [Shakespeare’s play] fi rst production a backlash against the ‘traditionalist’ version of King Richard’s history was written by Sir George Buck although it remained unpublished for some years. Later in the sixteenth century, Richard’s fate as the archetypal villain was sealed when John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough is reputed to have said ‘I take my history from Shakespeare’ despite the fact that Richard’s villainy was so over the top that the character has failed to gain acceptance as a real and identifiable person with many audiences. The Great Debate, as the study of Richard’s reputation became known, truly began in the seventeenth century when Horace Walpole wrote his Historic Doubts and rattled the cages of the traditionalists. That debate is not yet over, with the majority of the British historical academic community still promoting Richard as an infanticide. Some academics have acknowledged that Richard was a talented administrator and that he cannot be held responsible for the deaths of Henry VI and his son, but their overall assessment is still that of an evil and avaricious man. (2010) It would appear that the damage to Richard’s reputation is irreparable, a matter of some concern to a number of people, including the present Duke of Gloucester, who is the patron of the Richard III Society. If there is to be either a restoration of his good name, or at least a more balanced view of his deeds, it will be up to the historians to undo the damage done by such writers as, ironically, Thomas More and Shakespeare: Gaining a re-evaluation of Richard’s reputation entails the painstaking task of examining the primary and Tudor sources and assessing his actions, both as duke and king, against the background of his times, his contemporaries, his predecessors and his successors. The art of rhetoric, so beloved of one of Richard’s greatest critics, Sir Thomas More, comes into play as the interpretation of his actions, such as his 1484 legislation, which has been described as either ‘enlightened’ or

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Emily Sutherland ‘divisive’, depends on the writer’s orientation. There is no clear evidence that Richard was guilty or innocent of his so-called ‘crimes’, but historians, whether detractors or sympathisers, must work with the information derived from the sources and endeavour to present a balanced view of this controversial figure. (Moorhen 2010)

Anne Boleyn is another who has suffered at the hands of some writers and fi lm producers. Jerome de Groot, in his analysis of novels about Anne Boleyn, reveals that she has been variously portrayed as a witch and temptress or as a brilliant young woman who demonstrated an independence and spirit unusual for her time (De Groot 2010: 69–78). Both interpretations of her character cannot be correct. It is not difficult to support the argument that, in the spirit of justice and integrity we should not speak or write lies about a person. Whether the person is alive or dead does not alter this. A person’s reputation and good name is of great value, not only to the person concerned, but also to others who are associated with that person. The difficulties in deciding if an injustice has been done are threefold. The fi rst lies in both portraying any person at all. How can any of us know another person? The second difficulty is accruing sufficient information from primary and secondary sources to make an informed judgment about a person, and then choosing which aspects to reveal. Even if a writer could set out in minute detail every moment of a person’s life, and this would be very tedious, there would still be actions and words that would be open to interpretation, so the devil is not necessarily in the detail. Both Thomas More and Shakespeare would have framed their interpretation of the actions of Richard III against the background of a Tudor monarchy. The accounts of Thomas More’s life vary according to the religious and political persuasions of the writer. His own writing has to be judged in the spirit of his historical period. Therefore any creative writer drawing on these sources must, in turn, make a decision as to what is accurate, relevant, useful and interesting. This brings me to the third, and possibly most important difficulty for the creative writer. A biographer should not be either a prosecutor or an advocate for his or her subject, but strive to present a complete trajectory of that person, as far as this is possible. Unlike the biographer, a writer of fiction need not strive for objectivity. The writer is telling a story, and this story should capture the interest and imagination of the reader. If the portrayal of a character is neutralized by an attempt to present every possible aspect, negative and positive, the writing would become bogged down in a morass of detail, explanation and counterexplanation. The result would be a book that nobody would ever want to read. There may, however, be a conflict between creativity and accuracy, where specific details are not established or whole periods of time undocumented. Historical novelists have a licence to fill in these gaps left by the historians, who are not permitted this

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freedom to the same extent. Does this licence of the imagination permit distortion and a biased portrait for the sake of the work as a whole? In a review of Room by Emma Donoghue, Kathy Hunt writes: ‘Simultaneously denying, appropriating and manipulating other people’s lives and truths not only raises questions about taste and ethics but compromises a narrative’ (2010: 25). Although Hunt is not referring to Wolf Hall, these comments could as well apply to Mantel’s novel. If More’s life and truth has been manipulated, even to advance the dramatic impact of the novel, it also raises questions not only of ethics but also the integrity of the narrative. This is where the question of balance and justice prevail. Tip the portrait too far in either direction, and the writer has created a character that, while it bears some resemblance to the original subject, is too far from that original to be allowed to bear his or her name. It is nevertheless imperative to understand that the primary concern of writers of fiction, including historical fiction, is their creative work. They are neither historians nor biographers. Therefore, the depiction of any character, whether this character is based on a person who once lived or is a complete fabrication relates, not to the reputation of the person, but to the integrity of their intention as novelists. The major precept for the writer is to produce the best novel within his or her capabilities. To choose to do otherwise, for reasons of commercial success, fear of offending focus groups or people of influence, or even through a lackadaisical attitude to the craft of writing, is to fail to act with integrity. Writers sometimes claim that characters take over their story and develop at will, leading the author into conversations and down byways and giving descriptions the writer had not originally envisaged. In one sense this is nonsense because the character is the creation of the writer, but in the act of writing, which is a creative process, ideas flow and stimulate this process. Some writers plan their work in minute detail before beginning the fi rst draft. Others begin with an idea and allow it to develop during the writing. In either method of working, and any method in between, ideas about the portrayal of a character in a certain way will become part of the writing process. Should the writer be impeded by the knowledge that this portrayal is a distortion of the real person who is being depicted? Put into another context, would Wolf Hall have been less successful as a piece of literature if Thomas More had been portrayed in a more sympathetic way, as a pious but misguided man who refused to compromise his principles? How would Thomas Cromwell have appeared in contrast? Had Shakespeare looked carefully at the evidence and decided that Richard III had not committed all manner of villainy and written his play accordingly, would his Richard III have even been worth staging? Certainly it may have been less engrossing. In using historical research with integrity, a writer has two considerations that sometimes are in confl ict. One is to the text, and the other is to the accuracy of the events or characters being recreated, which includes being aware that readers expect a degree of accuracy, even if they realize that an

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historical novelist is not the same as an historian. In her author’s notes to The Assassin’s Prayer, a story based on the journey of Joanna, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor, to Sicily where she is to be married, Ariana Franklin writes: So in order to prefigure the growing and stultifying power of the Latin Church at that time, I have felt justified in taking that journey and running with it, adding even more drama to what must have been an adventurous undertaking, though I have taken care (I always do) to make sure that none of the historical characters act out of character. (2010: 365) Having said that, Franklin cites one reference to justify her portrayal of Henry, the Young King. One hopes that, in a spirit of fairness, she did consult others. I have suggested earlier that Mantel’s portrayal of Thomas More is an act of injustice, and one that would cause distress and dismay to those people who revere Thomas More even though he has been dead these hundreds of years. I have not denied, on the other hand, that Wolf Hall is in my opinion a brilliant novel. Should the integrity of Mantel the novelist take precedence over Mantel’s use of historical research? To argue that the integrity of a text is only judged by its literary merit ignores the fact that writers must also respect matters of good taste. A text should not depict excessive violence or child pornography, incite racial hatred or feed religious fanaticism. In the same light, I would argue that these limitations should also include the depiction of a person who once lived. That character may not be depicted in a distorted and inaccurate fashion so that it destroys the reputation of the person. To defame the dead is no less heinous than to defame the living. No man or woman should be robbed of his or her good name.

REFERENCES Ackroyd, P. 1998. The Life of Thomas More. London: Chatto and Windus. Edwards, P., ed. 1967. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 3. New York: Macmillan / Free Press. Benn, S. L., and R. S.Peters. 1959. Social Principles in a Democratic State. London: Allen and Unwin. Bolt, R. 1960. A Man for All Seasons. London: Drama Library. Botelho, K. M. 2009. Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brien, D. L. 2009. ‘Based on a True Story: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives.’ TEXT 13: 1–6. http:// www.textjournal.com.au/oct09/brien.htm (accessed 15 May 2010). Comte-Sponville, A. T. 2003. A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues. Translated by C. Temerson. London: Vintage.

The Evil that Men Do Lives after Them 85 De Groot, J. 2010. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge. Deutsch, H. 2000. ‘Making Up Stories.’ In Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, edited by A. Everett and T. Hofweber. Stanford, CA: CSU. Franklin, A. 2010. The Assassin’s Prayer. London: Transworld. Glover, D. 2010. ‘The Other Cromwell, State Creator.’ Australian Literary Review, 3 February. Goodman, J. 2005. ‘Defending Author Essentialism.’ Philosophy and Literature 29. Guy, J. 2000. Thomas More. London: Arnold. Hirsch, E. D. 1967. Validity in Interpretation. London: Yale University Press. Hunt, K. 2010. ‘Book Review—Room by Emma Donoghue.’ Australian Review, 9–10 October. Lambdin, D. 2000. King’s Castle. New York: St. Martin’s. MacDonald Fraser, G. 2010. Quartered Safe Out Here. HarperCollins, E-books. MacIntyre, A. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mantel, H. 2009. Wolf Hall. London: HarperCollins, Fourth Estate. Moorhen, W. E. A. 2010. ‘A Brief Biography and Introduction to Richard’s Reputation.’ http://www.richardiii.net/r3_bio.htm (accessed 27 October 2010). Ovid. 1986. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peters, R. S. 1966. Ethics and Education. London: Allen and Unwin. Selden, R. 1989. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. The News Manual http://www.thenewsmanual.net/Resources/medialaw_in_ australia_o2.html (accessed 26 March 2010). Thomasson, A. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. New York: Cambridge University Press. . 2005. Email to author, subject line ‘Historical Characters,’ 5 December 2005.

6

When Is It Time for ‘Writing with an Untrammelled Pen’? Reconciling the South Australian Settler Colony with Its Violent Past in Simpson Newland’s Historical Novel, Paving the Way: A Romance of the Australian Bush Rick Hosking

Kate Grenville’s historical novel The Secret River may be considered a twenty-fi rst-century representation of the Australian settler colony dream, as it describes a family settling down and eventually prospering in Australia, but it also represents the emerging nation as an unsettled place where ongoing relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people were shaped by killings and massacres that left a residue of unease, memories of violence disturbing the dream (Grenville 2005). On this island continent, Grenville reminds us, Crusoe’s footprint was not the fi rst on the beach. Whereas this ‘black armband’ version of the national story may rile conservatives concerned to ‘whitewash’ the communal memory, The Secret River is a text that returns to darker stories about the fi rst comers: in Grenville’s case, she began with a search for her convict ancestor Solomon Wiseman, but she fi nished with a work of fiction about settling the Hawkesbury, the dispossession of indigenous people and unsettling memories of the pioneering process. Debates generated by The Secret River have shaped ideas about the cultural value and significance of twenty-fi rst-century historical fiction in Australia. These debates could be said to epitomize the whole question of how novelists may use historical research with integrity. Given this, it is not at all surprising that the novel should have attracted so much attention. It is one of the most important works of literary fiction published in Australia in recent years and enjoys considerable critical success. It won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the 2006 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards in 2006. It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. The Secret River has also been an international bestseller; it

When Is It Time for ‘Writing with an Untrammelled Pen’? 87 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Secret River has prompted a number of influential commentators— several of them professional historians, including Inga Clendinnen, John Hirst and Mark McKenna—to ask questions about who should, as Clendinnen puts it, ‘write the history of this country [Australia], and to admonish and nurture its soul’ (2006: 16). Clendinnen’s metaphor of a narrow track on which writers jostle for room is telling; she took exception to Grenville’s claims to high seriousness in The Secret River in an Australian Broadcasting Commission radio interview in which Grenville described herself as standing on a stepladder above all that squabbling about black armbands and whitewashes that mark historical debate in Australia (ABC 2005). Such assumptions about the priority and cultural value of the various kinds of historical writing led Clendinnen to rather provocatively defi ne the ‘confusion between the primarily aesthetic purpose of fiction and the primarily moral purpose of history which makes the present jostling for territory matter’ (2006: 34). Historical fiction writers, it seems, should dawdle along behind the seriously moral historians as they stride along confidently out there in front of the pack. In passing, the metaphor has been used before; we will remember Henry Lawson’s 1897 poem ‘The uncultured rhymer to his cultured critics,’ with its truculent conclusion addressed to his academic acquaintance Jack Brereton who had tried to help him develop his poetic technique: Must I turn aside from my destined way For a task your Joss would find me? I come with strength of the living day, And with half the world behind me; I leave you alone in your cultured halls To drivel and croak and cavil: Till your voice goes further than college walls, Keep out of the tracks we travel!

At issue in some of the responses to The Secret River is the extent to which historical fiction can shape the community memory of the ‘history’ of the Australian settler colony. We can now judge an historical novel that deals with contact history and violence by this yardstick: does the work engage in historical revisionism? Does it offer what we now call a black armband view of the times in question? Readings of The Secret River have raised further questions about historiographic issues in ‘historicals,’ as they are called in the publishing trade. There is no doubt that The Secret River precipitated debates about the appropriateness or otherwise of some rather controversial transpositions and elisions noticed in particular by Clendinnen, whose own work on contact history made her very aware of Grenville’s use of some of the

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standard historical sources about the early years of the colony in New South Wales (Clendinnen 2003). After The Secret River, discussions of the ethical implications and cultural value of any ‘historical’ must deal with the writer’s use of historical sources; writers who depart from ‘the record’ will do so at their peril. There are other issues raised by The Secret River that now shape how we now judge individual historical fictions. First, writers must deal with the question of political correctness, the representation of contemporary assumptions about motivations, attitudes and mindsets that are obviously based on the prevailing orthodoxies of the writer’s own times. There have been spirited debates about such features of The Secret River as the representation of manifestly contemporary ideas about indigenous land management practices, fi re-stick farming and other examples of indigenous environmental awareness, a knowledge seemingly inaccessible to Europeans in the early years when they dug up yams to replant the country with Indian corn. Second, critics have responded to Grenville’s refusal to ‘speak for’ indigenous people; whereas she is perfectly willing to represent how her British convicts thought about life in terra australis, there is no equivalent attempt to see things as indigenous people of the time might have done. We can of course ask whether the historical novelist can ever represent the typical attitudes and beliefs of the historical period in question; can we ever know anyone else? Should the writer now accept that all she can do is offer a contemporary reading of the period in question? Must the writer take full advantage of the benefits of hindsight and use dramatic irony to explore the tensions between then and now? Is it the writer’s duty to draw attention to the ways in which a sense of awareness of zeitgeist shared with readers will colour the ways in which the past is remembered? Such issues will continue to be of importance to historians and novelists alike as they bump and jostle for attention. Although many commentators have noted that the idea of historical fiction is oxymoronic—suggesting there will always be a tension, an ambivalence, when any fiction writer heads back along the track into the past—it may be that the enduring cultural value to the community of historical fiction is not so much its historiographic nature but rather an awareness of how a sense of the past is imaginatively reconstructed, how it contributes to the archive of ideas, stories and images that constitute the community’s cultural memory. A distinguishing feature of early twenty-fi rst-century Australian writing has been the publication of a cluster of significant and prize-winning novels that represent ongoing relations between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians. The critical success of these novels indicates that writers are very aware that there is still unfi nished business in Australia. Reconciliation between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians remains a significant national preoccupation in the ongoing community debate about the ethical legitimacy of the settler colony. The fact that several of these novels are historical fictions is also significant.

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How might this contemporary awareness of Reconciliation politics shape how we read colonial novels that were the fi rst to represent the contact zone and frontier history? The success of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and the controversies it has generated encourage us to reexamine the archive in the light of the critical issues her book has generated. How did colonial writers deal with the sometimes violent interactions between indigenous and nonindigenous people? How did personal contact with individuals possessing fi rsthand knowledge of such interactions shape the writing? How did writers write historical fiction when the official record about such episodes was still being assembled, at a time when only a few histories of any kind had been written?2 By the 1860s numbers of (sometimes ageing) colonists began to publish their memoirs and, increasingly, fiction and poetry that represented the fi rst coming of Europeans, beginning the process of looking backwards to the history of settlement, discussing the ethical and moral dilemmas raised by the colonial project and interrogating the prevailing attitudes to race relations. In some writers’ works indigenous people and culture were increasingly represented in sophisticated and sympathetic ways; some rare texts even represented transculturation, the give-and-take of cultural exchange and reciprocity in the contact zone.3 The focus of this chapter is Paving the Way: A Romance of the Australian Bush, an historical novel that appeared in 1893 in a London edition written by Simpson Newland (1835–1925), a colonial pastoralist and politician.4 Newland has an atypical background for an Australian colonial writer. He was a successful pastoralist and politician who served as treasurer in Sir John William Downer’s ministry in South Australia between June 1885 and June 1886.5 His novel was one of the most popular works published in late colonial Australia and was republished in at least twelve editions over the century after it fi rst appeared. It has been also reprinted in several notable editions. In 1913 it appeared in London in a large format illustrated Gay and Hancock edition; in 1936 it was reissued in a South Australian Centenary Edition by F. W. Preece; and in 1954 in a Coronation and Diamond Jubilee Edition, the latter two suggesting something of its ongoing recognition as a classic story of (South) Australian origins, a book to be remembered on anniversary celebrations of communal memory. In his Memoirs of Simpson Newland, C. M. G. Sometime Treasurer of South Australia, Newland has the following to say about the writing of Paving the Way: I had often thought . . . to write a book embodying the principal events of my bush life . . . I particularly wished to write of the aborigines, among whom I had worked and lived for so long. This fast declining race had always interested me, and I felt that within a comparatively short period very few people who actually knew the blacks would be left to chronicle something of their struggle against the white invader in the early days of British colonization in Australia. I also felt that many

90 Rick Hosking incidents in my bush life were worth recording, but my task was to connect them into a readable volume. Not entirely from a storyteller’s point of view did I experience difficulty, but in depicting the various scenes I had to change the setting of those that placed other characters depicted in an unpleasant light. The title caused me some cogitation, as I wished the book to be aptly named. My fi rst inspiration was ‘Footprints,’ but this name was described by the publisher as being more suitable for a work describing a missionary pioneer. ‘Paving the Way’ was fi nally decided upon, although some critics have suggested it also savours of a Sunday school story. (1926: 160–61) There are several implications in this statement of intentions, which reveal a fascinating, ambivalent and possibly irreconcilable mix of novelistic, didactic, historical, ethnographic, pedagogic and benevolent motives; in passing we might note the long shadow of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe on the imaginations of colonial writers in Newland’s first attempt to fi nd a title. First, the narrative is intended to be read as an historical novel, a retrospective narrative, representing a period in (South) Australian history from back then, from the time of the first comers. A number of commentators (beginning with Sir Walter Scott) have insisted that an historical fiction is best set a generation ago, some sixty years or so in the writer’s past (‘tis sixty years since’).6 At the beginning of his novel Newland returns to the very early years of European contact with the south coast when seals and later whales brought small businessmen-adventurers to the south coast, creators of Australia’s fi rst export industries. Although Newland rearranges history to suit his narrative concerns—his statement of intention makes it clear he will fictionalize if he sees fit to do so—he also makes it clear that many of the events he turned into the stuff of fiction do have a basis in fact. He intimates that even in 1893 there were individuals still living who had been implicated in ‘unpleasant’ events in the early years of the colony; fiction saves him from the necessity to name them. Second, the text represents an evolutionary process during which, as the title suggests, the superior white invader overwhelms the Aborigines. The trope deployed in the title is that of a way, a road or a path paved by the fi rst comers, the pioneers, whose footprints erase the older pathways of indigenous people, not only recalling Clendinnen’s metaphor of the track to the past on which writers jostle but also reminding us of the trope of the Australian nation as palimpsest, an idea associated with influential contemporary cultural historians such as Paul Carter; it is interesting to see the trope used in the late nineteenth century (Carter 1987). By the 1890s it was widely assumed that the indigenous survivors of contact would leave increasingly fainter marks on the country; Newland—and most of his contemporaries—held the view that the Aborigines were ‘fast declining.’ His novel will, therefore, ‘smooth the dying pillow,’ record the passing of

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a tragic race, doomed by the inexorable laws of social Darwinism and by the relentless advance of British imperialism, symbolized, in Jan Morris’s words, by those ‘rich splodges [on the world map] which . . . lay across five continents like spilled claret, or shed blood’ (1982: 15). Whereas Newland clearly recognizes the Aborigines’ standing as fated resisters to the invasion, in raising questions about the behaviour of the invaders he offers a cautionary reminder to any vainglorious and triumphalist reading of the colonial project in the late nineteenth century. When Newland wrote this paragraph, the number of indigenous people in the so-called ‘settled areas’ along the south coast had dwindled to a scant few; in recognition of that sad reality, this ambivalent note hints at some of the complexities of the colonial project his fiction will attempt to represent. In the preface to the novel, Newland has more to say about the debates about history and the writer’s role in representing the violence on the frontier: As, in a work on Australian pioneer life such as this purports to be, it might be difficult to present bare facts in an acceptable form to the general public, my object has been to blend truth and fiction in a connected narrative. That it partakes largely of a romance is certain, but the incidents, though so romantic, are mainly authentic, for these lives have been lived and these deaths have been died. It is not alone on the familiar ground of the Old World that heroic deeds have been performed or suffering nobly endured. To particularize too closely would not add interest to the story for the public, though it might in the opinion of those acquainted with many of the occurrences alluded to or more or less related. I have endeavoured to wound as few susceptibilities and tread on as few toes as possible; the time has not yet arrived in the life of Australia when the historian or novelist can write with an untrammelled pen. (1893: preface) Take the question fi rst of Paving the Way as Romance.7 There is no doubt that Paving the Way is, as J. J. Healy describes it, a protest novel, and given its subject matter—the nature of the settler-colonist enterprise— Newland’s subtitle, A Romance of the Australian Bush, seems curiously inappropriate in that bloody but ignoble deeds seem hardly to fit that generic description, especially these days when many readers denigrate romance fictions as recreational reading, as disposable as Kleenex (Healy 1969: 171). Nineteenth-century readers and writers were not so concerned about insisting on a clear line drawn between ‘literary’ historical fiction and Romance as we are today, when we dismiss such popular writing with pejorative labels like ‘bodice ripper,’ ‘bonnet drama’ and ‘books about men in very tight trousers.’ Newland, like so many others in his day, draws on Sir Walter Scott’s potent mix of romance and adventure in dramatizing

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historical events, and like Scott, he uses this mix to tell a national foundation story, a story of the pioneers, of the fi rst comers. There are echoes too of one of the American writers most shaped by Scott’s example, James Fenimore Cooper (more about this connection later). Newland translates ideas about Romance drawn from British popular fiction of the nineteenth century into an Australian setting, using Romance conventions in at least three ways. First, he deploys a number of stock or conventional devices that are often found in nineteenth-century popular fictions with an Australian setting, for example in Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859). There is a ‘silver spoon’ plot that turns on inheritance, nobility and title, the prodigal son returning to Britain and climbing the social ladder. In passing, the text in which these tropes are most effectively deployed is Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life—where they are mocked and parodied in splendid style (Furphy 1903). The protagonist, Roland Grantley, is the son of Roger Grantley, whose eldest brother is Sir Archibald Grantley of Grantley Hall, ‘an old Cumbrian family’ (PTW: 2). The novel opens with the Mary running before a southwesterly gale through the Southern Ocean with Roland and his mother on board; his father has died on the passage out. The Mary is wrecked on the Australian coast about a day’s sail from a bay-whaling station glimpsed from the sea; Mrs. Grantley dies; and Roland struggles ashore with other survivors, all of whom—save for Roland—are murdered by Aborigines. The young orphan has to fend for himself in the wilds of Australia where, over the space of twenty or more years, he copes well, eventually becoming a squatter with considerable holdings along the Darling river in New South Wales. His adolescent alliance at Encounter Bay with Petrel Cleeve, the daughter of the ex-convict from Van Diemen’s Land in charge of that whaling station, is viewed unfavourably both by members of his family in Australia—and by Sir Archibald back in Cumbria—forcing Roland to make the decision to preserve the family name and honour by not marrying Petrel, a decision he is to rue for the remainder of the novel. As a consequence, Roland is doomed to a romantic exile in Central Australia; his friendship with the Aboriginal girl, Miola, suggests how far his pride has taken him and how far he has fallen; and the blighted, drought-scarred and violent outback landscape is metonymic for his emotional condition. The novel ends with Roland lighting out for the territory to fight with the Indians in North America against the invaders. As his name suggests, Grantley is drawn straight from Romance stereotypes; the name ‘Roland’ suggests Charlemagne’s paladin, who chose to fight on against impossible odds. Newland’s Roland makes the wrong call; he chooses duty to family and social class, and so he must suffer up the Darling. Morose, taciturn and deeply Byronic, the last we hear of him is he is ‘leading a fierce band of Red Indians of the Far West of America in their last desperate struggle against their white oppressors’ (PTW: 415). These days we mock such tropes and textual details when they are deployed without

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irony; it is on such textual occasions when we recognize a manifestation of late-nineteenth-century political correctness in operation, whereby the novelist cannot imagine representing the squatter’s career without drawing on orthodox attitudes to social advancement drawn from the European popular fiction of the period. Newland’s chapter titles reveal an ironic awareness of the debt to Romance that sits uneasily with how such elements are deployed in the novel: ‘Pet to the Rescue,’ ‘A Deed of Derring-Do,’ ‘Blighted Love,’ ‘Fresh Fields and Pastures New,’ ‘Romance Derring-Do.’ Then there are stereotypical characters like Seth Jacobs, the Fagin-lookalike Jewish ‘fence’ on board the Mary: ‘a short, spare man whose features proclaimed his Jewish origin. With restless movements and furtive glances, he glided along the deck’ (PTW: 4). It is Jacobs’s ill-gotten buried treasure that is buried in the sand hills of the Coorong that provides the tired old narrative backstory that begins and ends the novel. As it turns out, there is some small basis in fact for this subplot as there was some gold coin on board the Maria, the historical original for the fictional Mary, some of which may have been buried in the Coorong sand hills.8 When Newland makes the strong claim that it ‘is not alone on the familiar ground of the Old World that heroic deeds have been performed or suffering nobly endured,’ he may well have been commenting on the prevailing idea of the ‘juvenility’ of Australia, as Frederick Sinnett had famously described it in his essay ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1969), published in the Journal of Australasia in Melbourne in 1856: It is alleged against Australia that it is a new country, and, as Pitt said, when charged with juvenility, ‘this is an accusation which I can neither palliate nor deny’. Unless we go into the Aboriginal market for ‘associations’, there is not a single local one, of a century old, to be obtained in Australia. . . . No storied windows, richly dight, cast a dim, religious light over any Australian premises. There are no ruins for that rare old plant, the ivy green, to creep over and make his dainty meal of. No Australian author can hope to extricate his hero or heroine, however pressing the emergency may be, by means of a spring panel and a subterranean passage, or such like relics of feudal barons, and refuges of modern novelists, and the offspring of their imagination. There may be plenty of dilapidated buildings, but not one, the dilapidation of which is sufficiently venerable by age, to tempt the wandering footsteps of the most arrant parvenu of a ghost that ever walked by night. (1969: 9–10)9 By the 1890s, numbers of writers—Catherine Helen Spence, Marcus Clarke, ‘Rolf Boldrewood,’ Ellen Liston, Jessie Couvreur, Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed, to name just a few—had adapted European Romance conventions to Australian settings in both men’s and women’s varieties.

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Australian readers were well used to such features appearing in Antipodean settings. Newland’s version is just one among many. Paving the Way certainly reveals the acclimatization of Romance conventions, but its use of memories and stories about real events as a basis for historical fiction is its most significant feature; historian G. K. Jenkin calls Paving the Way ‘a major document of colonial history’ (2007: preface). As his preface makes clear, there is no doubt that Newland wanted to represent the colony’s past; few other Australian colonial novels use so many historical events as starting points for plot developments. He was also uniquely placed when he turned to writing in the 1880s. Not only did both his political and family background give him access to a rich stock of stories about the early days, but he was also able to publish his novel before most of the more formal ‘histories’ of contact of various kinds had appeared. Indeed, his novel has been for many Australians the only published source of information about various massacres; I have heard a number of anecdotes that tell us how the Maria massacre is remembered from both indigenous and nonindigenous storytellers that seem to owe a great deal to Newland’s version. In his 1895 pamphlet ‘Some Aboriginals I Have Known’ Newland calls his novel ‘the Chronicles of the South,’ rather solemnly implying something of his method. As is typical of many historical novels of the period—for example, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life—Newland also includes a number of authorial intrusions, asides and footnotes in his novel which are intended to reinforce the impression of the text’s historicity: ‘this veracious story’ (PTW: 11); ‘A Fact’ (PTW: 92); ‘There was much more which the modest pen of the historian refuses to chronicle’ (PTW: 97); ‘A Fact’ (PTW: 98). Some footnotes reveal the knowing narrator at work: one, for example, describes the erroneous belief of many early settlers that Aborigines had ‘a craving for the kidney-fat of the white man, as a delicate article of food, or as an ointment to inspire courage’ (PTW: 127), a fascinating detail in that such knowledge about the taking of kidney-fat is often revealed in many colonial writings by writers determined to show they are in the know. Here Newland disputes such assertions. As also happens in many nineteenth-century historical novels in the shadow of Sir Walter Scott, there are a number of substantial discursive and didactic authorial intrusions on various subjects, many to do with indigenous Australians, even to the extent of adopting the ethnographic present tense that is a common feature of such moments in nineteenthcentury fiction. The following is a typical early example: The natives [sic] dances vary. Frequently they are essentially of a peaceful and unexciting nature, in which mere amusement for the multitude is sought. On special occasions, when feminine visitors or captives are present, they are of a distinctly festive and immoral tendency; then proceedings are indulged in that polite society would

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shudder at, but which the laws of the Australian aborigine sanction. Again, when the theme is war, the warrior is painted and bedizened with tenfold elaboration from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. Weapons in hand, he parades proudly before his people, boasting of past exploits and vaunting of his prowess in the future. Hideous, grotesque, yet striking, he forms one of the whirling, bounding throng of warlike figures, passing before the bewildered eyes of the spectator with brandished arms and waving plumes in strange and swift evolution. Again, they form in line, square, or other intelligible order and foot it featly, all the time uttering suppressed, fierce cries to the accompaniment of their trampling feet, the clash of weapons and the beat of their rude music. Hour succeeds hour; often the whole night long, or indeed successive nights, are thus spent and the excitement lasts until nature can no more. It is the same with all the black-fellow’s pleasures—eating, drinking, sleeping or the tender passion; in all alike he knows or acknowledges no law to limit his full indulgence. (PTW: 20) As Johannes Fabian has reminded us, such ‘expert’ or ‘insider’ perspectives represent ‘savage life’ as preserved forever as a kind of intermission, outside or beyond meaningful historical or even fictional time (1983). Time will pass them by, is the implication. Another characteristic of historical fiction is the inclusion of real characters, usually in the background to the action, just as Scott’s Ivanhoe includes among its cast Robin Hood and Richard, King of England. Numbers of the minor characters in Paving the Way can be identified: David Cleeve was based on a shore whaler of the same name at the Encounter Bay fishery.10 Another reference suggests he was also an employee of Newland’s father.11 The original for Petrel Cleeve seems to have been Mrs Caroline Cakebread, née Rumbelow, from the well-known fishing family, and a childhood friend of Newland’s.12 Various historical personages such as the policeman Thomas O’Halloran, protector of Aborigines Dr. Matthew Moorhouse and policeman Alexander Tolmer appear as Major Cuthbert, Mr. Buckstone and Inspector Danker, respectively. Interestingly, all the white characters are given fictional names.13 Some of the Aboriginal characters are also based on people Newland knew when growing up at Yilki, or later, during his time on the Darling: however, all the indigenous characters are given their real-life names. The ‘Ramingara’ are the Encounter Bay people: Big Solomon, One-Armed Charley and Big Tom; the ‘Parkingee’ are the River Darling people: Barpoo, Toby, Jollyboy, King James, Warlo Jack, Kitty, Dick (Watulganya), Baldy and Miola. All are named—and described at length—in Newland’s 1895 pamphlet, in more or less the same terms as they appear in Paving the Way; this fascinating pamphlet provides insights into the close relationships Newland enjoyed with Aboriginal people and bears out the oft-mentioned

96 Rick Hosking sympathy he felt for them.14 His introduction to the 1913 reprint contains this pointed observation: Since this book was fi rst issued there has been a fuller recognition of the ethnological importance of collecting from the pioneers of Australia—now fast passing away—all possible information of the customs, habits, and traditions of the aborigines. The publication of another edition seems a fitting opportunity for assisting this object by reviewing that part of the work in which individuals of the aboriginal race play their part. This is the more necessary as ‘The Doom of the Mullas’ and ‘A True Tale of the Wompangees’ appearing in the pages of a romance might well be ascribed to the imagination of the author. As memory goes back, the actors appear before me from their mouldering graves, picturesque, interesting figures in a strange wild land. Nearly all the coloured characters portrayed were drawn from life. The originals were members of some of the fi nest tribes of all Australia. The tribes of the Tatiara, the Murray, and Darling rivers are peculiarly interesting because they, perhaps, of all their race made the most determined resistance to the European aggressor. This they were probably enabled to do as the deadly rifle and revolver of the white man were not then in use. (1893/1913: vii) Here Newland notes one of the ways in which the passing of time shapes how certain subjects will be understood in fiction not only by readers but even by the writer. Although he may have begun with the intention of representing accurately ‘the customs, habits, and traditions of the aborigines,’ and although all of the indigenous characters he not only describes but names in his novel had their counterparts in real life, by the early twentieth-century such cultural ‘history’ increasingly reads not only as picturesque, fitting for Romance writing but also—and perhaps paradoxically—as ‘ethnological,’ a confusion of attitudes that shows us one of the most telling ways in which the colonists remembered the Aborigines, and especially those concerned to smooth the dying pillow. This motive, described here with a complicated theatrical metaphor, was no doubt influenced by Newland’s participation in the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian Branch), an influential group that he led between 1895 and 1900 and again between 1920 and 1922. That a Romance novel might have contributed something to his case for a leadership role in this society is worth noting.15 To return to the historicity of Paving the Way, there is no doubt that the novel does blend truth and fiction. The intriguing remark that ‘the time has not yet arrived in the life of Australia when the historian or novelist can write with an untrammelled pen’ suggests Newland wrote fiction because he believed it gave him the freedom to hide or disguise his sources, a freedom not permitted to the historian, a freedom that, as I will suggest, Newland may have found it politic to grasp. It should be remembered

When Is It Time for ‘Writing with an Untrammelled Pen’? 97 how well placed creative writers were at strategic moments in the various Australian colonies’ evolution; they were able to tackle historical themes and subjects in memoir, prose, poetry and even play scripts before formal histories had appeared, giving them a unique opportunity to represent the past using community memories, family history, subaltern storytelling and popular journalism before orthodox readings of the past—mainstream or politically correct readings—became accepted. By the time Kate Grenville came to write The Secret River, the historical sources on which she drew were well known and much studied by professional historians; in Paving the Way, on the other hand, Newland’s sources were in community folklore, journalism, memoir and oral history. Furthermore, his standing as a political figure from a wealthy, respected and socially significant family gave his various writings—fiction, memoir, ‘ethnology’—considerable eminence in the community; whereas we might have expected Newland to offer a conformist squatter’s view of the colonial project with anything but a subaltern outlook, his novel is anything but orthodox. Contemporary readers interested in the evolution of the communal memory of the colonial past will fi nd much of interest in how the historical novelist represents the ‘mainly authentic’ incidents that form the basis for much of the fi rst part of Paving the Way. Newland did take Sinnett’s advice to ‘go into the Aboriginal market for “associations,”’ fi nding material for fiction in the ‘contact zone’ where Europeans and Aborigines came into contact and often collision. In the introduction to the 1913 edition, Newland makes the following statement about the historicity of the events he represents: Though tinged with romance, they could more correctly be described as a history of the early days of a large portion of Australia. Very many of the incidents depicted are true, and most of the characters are drawn from life. (1913: introduction) Paving the Way opens with a fictional reconstruction of the wreck of the Maria (called the Mary in the novel) on the Coorong beach in July 1840 and the massacre of the twenty-six survivors by the Milmenrura of the Coorong, a clan of the Ngarrindjeri, the single largest killing of nonindigenous people in colonial Australia. It then presents a fictional version of an overlanding trip with stock along the Murray from New South Wales to South Australia, based on Newland’s brother-in-law Henry Field’s experience of overlanding. The punitive white payback expedition led by police against the Milmenrura is then described, culminating in the drum-head court-martial and hanging of two of the supposed murderers. A second overlanding trip is then described, which concludes with a fictional recreation of the Rufus River massacre. Newland then details a further ‘collision’ between Aborigines and Europeans in the Tatiara district, drawing on two historical episodes: the 1849 killing by James (or Jimmy) Brown of

98 Rick Hosking Kalyra Station of an unknown number of Bungandiji people and his attempt to destroy the evidence by burning the bodies; there follows Darkie’s epic ride on Roland’s horse, Star, to escape the police, an historical episode again involving a partner of James Brown, who undertook such a ride from the Coorong to Adelaide to establish an alibi after leaving arsenic-poisoned flour to be consumed by Aborigines. The novel concludes with less-detailed references to further ‘affrays’ and collisions on the Darling River, no doubt less detailed because by the time Newland took up his pastoral leases with brother-in-law Henry Field in New South Wales, internecine warfare between blacks and whites was less common. No other nineteenth-century Australian novel deals in such detail with so many violent encounters in the ‘contact zone’; no other writer of historical fiction from the period had such close family connections with such events. Members and close associates of his family were directly involved not only in the aftermath to the wreck of the Maria but also in the two historical ‘collisions’ represented in the novel: the Rufus River and the Avenue Range massacres. I will now turn to Newland’s representation of the Avenue Range massacre. The episodes that determine Grantley’s fate and shape his future occur in the middle sections of the novel. After the second overlanding expedition, Enfield recuperates at Talkie, where he falls in love with Roland’s sister, Maria; it is then decided there should be general movement to take up land on the Tatiara in the southeast, where the country is more suitable for sheep. Enfield and Gifford form a partnership on one run; Grantley and Darkie take up another, but even before they can build their hut there is trouble with the ‘black wretches’ (PTW: 140). A neighbour called Lawn has been troubled with minor pilfering and sheep stealing, and there are rumours of a shooting or two. Darkie, the man with a past—it is hinted that he is a former convict from Van Diemen’s Land—warns Roland that trouble is looming: It’s a bad beginning . . . the only way with these fellows is to keep them at a distance. . . . That wreck business taught them the value of our tools and gave them a taste for tobacco . . . they had no difficulty in that collision with the whites and naturally despise us as fighters. We shall have to teach them differently before they will feel a proper respect for us. (PTW: 140–41) Grantley, however, is now just as keen as Darkie to take direct action. He tells Darkie that he is ‘not going to allow the aboriginal possessor of the soil, whatever his rights may be, to break my sheep’s legs with impunity; much less his own’ (PTW: 141). Darkie smiles with satisfaction to hear Grantley speak so. The young squatter has crossed the line; he is threatening to go beyond the pale. Newland then interrupts his narrative to give us a thousand-word essay on the theme of frontier violence in the style of Sir Walter Scott, a sample of which follows:

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Meantime, encouraged by impunity the aggressor went on until, in defence of his property or even of his life, the squatter took the matter into his own hands and with powder and ball effectually protected both. Often when exasperated by losses and by the wanton destruction of his animals, or in fear of his own life and the lives of those depending upon him, he too gave rein to the brutal instinct of slaughter that seems inherent in man and then it simply came to be a question of the survival of the fittest. Men who in the ordinary vocations of life were kind and humane have often been heard to sum up the subject in the terse remark: ‘The black man must go under’; and by this they meant that he must ‘go under’ in the most summary manner known to our race, which does not admit of much time for the slower, though not less sure, processes of civilization to work his destruction. The characters sketched in this story were in the position referred to in the preceding remarks: far from the settlements, surrounded by some of the fiercest of the native tribes of Australia and entirely dependent upon themselves. It is not to be wondered at if, under these circumstances, deeds were committed at which humanity shudders. It is generally assumed that the blacks were the aggressors. No doubt they were so, by stealing sheep and cattle; but that was in retaliation for their country having previously been taken possession of and in this respect it cannot be disputed that the white man was the aggressor. (PTW: 143) This peroration anticipates a collision that occurs after some sheep are stolen. Darkie and Grantley pursue the tracks of the sheep-stealers to their camp where they open fi re, killing ‘ten or a dozen’ (PTW: 145). Darkie then advises they should collect the bodies and burn them with the dead sheep; they have lost over a hundred head. As they contemplate the bodies, Grantley observes that squatting will not pay if they continue to lose sheep at this rate; Darkie responds that he must clear out if he cannot stop the slaughter of sheep, to which Grantley responds that he is ‘not of the stuff to do that’ (PTW: 146). Later that evening they return to the scene of the shootings, to fi nd that the bodies have not been taken away by their kin. While Roland piles up the dead sheep, Darkie collects the bodies of the slain. They build a huge fi re and try to destroy all evidence. As they work, Grantley observes that it is ‘difficult to see how something of the kind is to be avoided, if we Britishers are to continue our mission of going forth ‘to subdue and replenish the earth’ (PTW: 146), more or less quoting Genesis.16 News of the disturbances in the Tatiara reaches Adelaide; a police party is despatched, their neighbour ‘young Lawn’ and his overseer are arrested on charges of murder and sent to town to stand trial. Darkie warns Grantley that the old lags’ ‘freemasonry’ has informed him that the police

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are also coming to arrest them both: Human bones have been found by the authorities in the ashes where they had tried to destroy the evidence. He tells his employer that he is a man with a past, and that he cannot face arrest; he will flee to Kangaroo Island to join an American whaler. Grantley agrees that Darkie can take his horse Star; just as his companion gallops away, the police arrive and Grantley is arrested. After an epic ride along the Coorong beach to the Murray Mouth and beyond, Darkie makes it to the whale fishery where he is taken by Petrel to an island offshore from which he then sails to freedom; Grantley, however, stays to face the law. The jury will not convict his neighbours the Lawns; the Crown prosecutor then withdraws the case against Grantley. His lawyer comments wryly: Any one might have known this would be the result; but the officials want to give you gentlemen a lesson . . . and, above all, to show that they do something in the interests of the aborigines. Briefly, it means this: whatever you do, don’t be such fools in the future as to let it get known. (PTW: 178) Even though the Crown may have decided that a case against Grantley will never be made to the satisfaction of a jury of his peers, Grantley is profoundly unsettled by the experience. When Petrel decides she cannot wait for him any longer and marries another, and his sister goes missing, Grantley makes the decision to move to New South Wales, leasing a run on the Darling. This sequence of events set in the Tatiara is clearly based on the James Brown story; it has been recognized for some time that Newland drew on ‘frontier folklore,’ accounts of the Avenue Range massacre story of 1848, the attempt to burn the bodies and the famous ride along the Coorong beach and the abortive attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice in the Supreme Court in June 1849.17 Newland’s character Darkie is obviously based on Brown’s associate, the stock keeper Eastwood, known in the district as Yorky; it was he who absconded to Kangaroo Island to join a whaler. Although there is no doubt that stories about Brown were told—and continue to be told—by both indigenous and nonindigenous people, there is also a considerable archive of government accounts. There are reports from both Dr. Matthew Moorhouse, the protector of Aborigines and Captain Butler, the local magistrate who investigated the case; there are accounts in the Adelaide papers and court records.18 Although Newland may well have drawn on both oral and written sources, one other source of information could have been his half-brother, Watts Newland, who had had a long history with the Brown brothers. Watts Newland got to know Brown and his brother Alexander when the brothers had settled at Allendale at Encounter Bay in 1840. Watts was in business with Jimmy Brown as early as 1846, running sheep on the shores of Lake Albert in

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partnership with the brothers.19 In 1849 Watts moved with the Browns to the southeast, where James founded Avenue Range Station—also known as Kalyra, just south of present-day Lucindale, thirty-five kilometres or so east of Maria Creek, now Kingston.20 There is no evidence that Watts Newland was directly involved in the Avenue Range massacre, but there is one curious detail in the archive of published accounts of the collision. Like so many of his ‘fi rst comer’ contemporaries, as an old man Watts Newland published a reminiscence in the Register; he records his long history of involvement with the Brown brothers. They were the fi rst to take sheep across the Murray Mouth, and he spent three years in partnership with them in and around Encounter Bay before they moved to the ‘south-east’ in 1849 where they ‘fi xed on a place 20 miles east of Maria Creek, now Kingston. This station remained in the possession of Mr J Brown for a number of years, and on it he made a large fortune.’ Watts Newland also gives a brief comment on relationships with the Aborigines: ‘We were molested by the black. They were extremely treacherous and inveterate thieves’ (W. Newland 1906: 7c). His choice of pronoun is overt. A fortnight after this reminiscence appeared in the Adelaide Register, ‘Resident of the Fifties’ wrote a letter in response, pointing out that ‘Mr Watts Newland has omitted mention of the terrible massacre near the Avenue Station . . . Mr Newland, who was in the south-east at the time, must have heard of it.’ The details of the massacre are then given: in 1848 some sheep had been killed; two men went to the camp and shot a number of people, including old men, women and children. The story was then told to Mr. J. Smith by a black boy named Tarrwin; the authorities were informed; the protector of Aborigines, Dr. Moorhouse, was sent to investigate; evidence was collected; J. Brown was arrested and charged. It is then alleged that the Aboriginal witness was ‘tampered with’ and would not speak before the court; the judge dismissed the case. The second man absconded by crossing the Murray and was never seen again.21 Whereas it is clear that the writer is not accusing Watts Newland of direct involvement, the implication is that he must have known about the matter. Was Watts involved, if only on the margins of the episode? Was this one main reason why his brother decided that he would fictionalize the story? Was this the reason why it was impossible for his brother the novelist to write ‘with an untrammelled pen’? There is a further intriguing aspect to Paving the Way that shows us how in this colonial period writers might possess a relationship with their sources now difficult to imagine in an information-rich, twenty-fi rstcentury world: Paving the Way will not make us think of contemporary novelists studying records in an archive or online, but instead make us consider a colonial writer in his late fi fties looking back over not only his community and his family’s collection of stories but his own complex memories of events that—when he was writing—his community was

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beginning to recognize as the stuff of history. This will be apparent to twenty-fi rst-century readers when reading the Darling River section of the novel, and in particular in wondering about the representation of the young Barkindji woman Miola, Grantley’s house servant on his run. She is a very sympathetic character. She is described as speaking ‘pure’ English (PTW: 289) and as being able to read and write, a clever girl (PTW: 333); Newland’s various autobiographical writings describe her in the same terms. Of course, characters drawn from life can be found in historical fictions; a curious feature of Paving the Way can be found towards the end, with something of the challenge to the omniscient storytelling voice so often heard in nineteenth-century historical fiction. The traditional authorial perspective of the earlier sections of the novel gives way to a series of fi rst-person narratives told by (mostly) indigenous characters, including one by Miola. However, Newland cannot fi nally allow his characters to speak without the mediating effects of romance conventions. When his indigenous characters are given space to speak for themselves, they speak in a ponderous approximation of the pseudopoetic patois of James Fenimore Cooper’s Mingoes and Mohicans. This is one way in which late nineteenthcentury political correctness manifests itself. Cooper’s influence was so pervasive that an Australian novelist who was very well aware of how indigenous people used English could still suggest that a Barkindji woman might sound like a female version of Chingachgook. 22 Cooper learned the craft of writing historical novels from Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s interest in dialect had a double impact on colonial writers, not only from his own example, but also from those of his imitators, such as Cooper. At the conclusion of Paving the Way, readers will ask a number of questions. Newland has taken considerable trouble to represent some of the bloodiest moments of contact from the fi rst twenty years of the history of white settlement in South Australia, moments that refl ect very badly indeed on the pastoralists, the fi rst comers who had ‘opened up’ or ‘pioneered’ the country, those who paved the way. Why should Newland, in the decade after his long career as a pastoralist and then politician had fi nished, wish to pursue these matters that reflect so badly on his class and caste? Was he disturbed by the possible complicity of his own brother in a notorious episode? Why should Newland—in spite of his pronouncements—have wanted to write with such an untrammelled pen about matters which, by the end of the nineteenth century (and even at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst), most Australians wished to forget or denied ever happened? At many places in the text Newland interrupts his narrative and essays the issues at some length and with considerable passion, his theme that ‘the darkest stain on Australia’s fair fame is her treatment of the aboriginal race’ (PTW: 69). There is another way of reading the novel, remembering Newland’s social standing and his time as a politician. Paving the Way was published in 1893, twelve years after Newland entered the South Australian Parliament

When Is It Time for ‘Writing with an Untrammelled Pen’? 103 in 1881 and seven years after Newland had completed his term as treasurer in the Sir John Downer ministry (1885–86). The novel was thus written in the shadow of Newland’s political career, at a time of increasing awareness of nation building. Premier Downer was a committed federalist, and by the mid-1890s politicians from the various Australian colonies were deeply involved in developing the idea of the Australian Commonwealth. It is thus not surprising that although the 1890s might have been a forwardlooking decade, it was also a time—especially west of the Divide—marked by a search for origins, by nostalgia for the experiences of the fi rst comers. South and West Australians had anxieties about federation: many of us were and still are keen to assert the importance of the local and the regional in the face of hegemonic national social, economic and cultural perspectives generated from Sydney and Melbourne and (later in the twentieth century) from Canberra. Paving the Way remembers how the way was paved. The Tatiara episode in Newland’s novel stresses the fact that in choosing to amass his wealth in the way his protagonist did—through the brutal and violent dispossession of the Bungandiji people—and in making his decision not to marry the ‘currency lass’ Petrel, the daughter of a Van Demonian because of the harm it might do to his ancient name—Grantley is seen as doubly unfit for domesticity and familial duty in the new Australian style. He is unfit to father the ‘rising Australian generation.’ In the 1890s the powerful trope of ‘family of the nation’ is often encountered. The idea of family had many meanings at both the individual and at the communal level; in the Australian colonies, discussions about federation might have meant a weakening of links with the British mother, personified in Queen Victoria, who lives on in Australia in place, street and state names. The family was the microcosm of both nation and Empire, a compelling symbol of unity, community and altruism in a decade challenged by the impact of industrialism, class warfare and militarism. Newland, with the wisdom of his years as both pastoralist and politician, wished to reflect on the nature of the South Australian version of the settlercolonial enterprise in the writing of his novel. No doubt he was prompted at least in part by the still-notorious aftermath of the Maria affair and the passionate debates the nature of indigenous citizenship in the emerging nation that it provoked both in the colony and back in Britain through the 1840s and beyond, which contributed to the recall of the governor of the colony at the time, Colonel George Gawler. Perhaps, like Kate Grenville more than a century later, he felt some uneasiness about his family’s involvement in the dark deeds back at the beginning. There is a strong sense of unfi nished business about the novel. Newland is an early example of a writer convinced that Australia must recognize its history and seek to be reconciled with that past and especially with the people affected by those dark deeds. As Mark McKenna has noted, ‘Aboriginal history and frontier history are now a very real presence in . . . [Australia's] social and political fabric. An uncomfortable presence it may often be, but it is, nevertheless, a

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presence and not a silence.’ (2006). Newland was one of the fi rst Australian writers to understand this. An uneasiness about the often-tragic consequences of colonialism was, J. J. Healy has argued, a characteristic response made by some colonial Europeans in contact with tribal indigenous Australians in the Bush (Healy 1978/1989: 21). The ‘great rich fictional unease of nineteenth century Australian fiction’ is well revealed here, what we now recognize as the dark side of the Australian Dream. In Paving the Way this unease (however chaotically, contradictorily and incompletely represented) is expressed by Newland with a passion rare in nineteenth-century Australian fiction. Is Newland going so far as to suggest that a combination of British class attitudes together with illegal and brutal practices against the indigenous Australians have tainted the Australian settler-colonial enterprise so that it was, at its heart, morally and ethically corrupt? In the text’s representation of the belligerent and even martial nature of experience in the southern Australian contact zone, in its refusal to take seriously the unthinking assumptions that all things brought in the cultural baggage from Britain might transport easily and comfortably to Australia, Paving the Way deserves to be read when we return to the archive to find how writers have represented such difficult history.

NOTES 1. The poem was originally published in the Bulletin (25 December 1897) and then appeared in Henry Lawson, Verses Popular and Humorous (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1900). Brian Matthews was the fi rst individual I heard make this connection. 2. The archive of colonial Australian novels that represent frontier violence includes Charles de Boo’s Fifty Years Ago: An Australian Tale (1867), which fi rst appeared in a series of fourteen pamphlets published by Gordon and Gotch in Sydney, then as a single volume in the same year. It was then serialized by the Australian Journal in Melbourne between April 1869 and February 1870, appearing again after De Boos’s death in 1906 in a revised and abridged edition retitled Settler and Savage: One Hundred Years Ago in Australia. Charles de Boos, Fifty Years Ago: An Australian Tale (Canberra: Mulini Press, 1999). This edition restores the 1876 Gordon and Gotch fi rst book-length version. Rolf Boldrewood’s ‘The Squatter’s Dream’ fi rst appeared as a serial in the Australian Town and Country Journal in 1875. It was later edited extensively and then published in book form with the new title Ups and Downs: A Story of Australian Life in London in 1878. It was reissued with its more familiar title as The Squatter’s Dream in 1890. A. J. Vogan, The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia: With Illustrations and Map by the Author (London: Murray, 1902). 3. This sentence draws on Mary Louise Pratt (1992: 6–7). 4. S. Newland (1893). Page numbers are from the 1972 Seal Books (Rigby) edition of Paving the Way and will be given in text as PTW with a page number from here on. An e-book version of the novel is available at http:// purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/p00114 (accessed 20 July 2010).

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5. Although Newland’s work is not discussed in Geoffrey Dutton, The Literature of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1976); Leonie Kramer and Adrian Mitchell, The Oxford History of Australian Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985); Laurie Hergenhan, The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1988); John Docker, The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991); Laurie Clancy, A Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992). Here and there Paving the Way does rate a mention: H. M. Green describes the novel as a work in which Newland ‘worked his own and earlier up-country experiences into a loosely built and unpretentious story which in spite of the melodramatic element has something of the freshness of those adventurous days.’ H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied, revised by Dorothy Green (London: Angus and Robertson, 1984–1985), 660. Paul Depasquale asserts bluntly that Paving the Way is ‘the South Australian novel of pioneering life: its scope is vast, its range of characters wide and representative, its narrative dimensions epic, its basic honesty impressive.’ P. Depasquale, A Critical History of South Australian Literature, 1836–1930 with Subjectively Annotated Bibliographies (Warradale: Pioneer, 1978), 179. 6. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), available as a single fi le at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/scott_walter/waverley/ complete.html (accessed December 2010). 7. I use the word ‘Romance’ with a capital R to suggest the literary form with many subgenres that developed from the medieval Romances of chivalry, novels with clearly delineated characters, adventures, quests and exotic settings, usually themes of honour and loyalty and with a love story (and marriage) at their heart. The lower-case ‘romance’ refers specifically to typical contemporary usage: love stories and relationships. 8. The stories about the gold supposedly carried on the Maria are still told: ‘“There’s a fortune in gold somewhere out there.’ The old man gesticulated and talked excitedly as he gazed out across the rolling sandhills of the Younghusband peninsula. He spoke of the lost treasure of the ill-fated Maria, whose passengers and crew were massacred by Aborigines in 1840. And listening, I remembered how as a boy I had dreamed of discovering pirate hoards of buried treasure, and how later I had bemoaned the fact that Australia was too young a country to possess treasure-fi lled ancient wrecks as those of the Caribbean.’” J. Loney, ‘Shipwreck Treasure: In Search of Australia’s Martime Heritage,’ Australian Geographic 1, no. 4 (1986): 29. 9. Sinnett is quoting John Milton. 10. A retired whaler named ‘Peg-Leg Jones’ may have been the source for Cleeve. ‘Where History was Made: Romantic Associations of Encounter Bay,’ Mail, 4 December 1926: 17. 11. Charles Hodge quotes Newland as saying that Cleeve was based on ‘a man in his father’s employ.’ C. R. Hodge, Encounter Bay: The Miniature Naples of Australia—A Short History of the Romantic Coast of South Australia (Adelaide: C. R. Hodge, 1932): 128. 12. Mail, 4 December 1926: 17. The ‘hale and hearty’ Mrs Cakebread was interviewed for this article, and it appears that she thought ‘many of the incidents related in the book regarding the joys and sorrows of Petrel and Roland are true.’ Other things are, however, ‘mere romance.’ Simpson Newland’s son, Dr. H. S. Newland, wrote to the Mail the following week (11 December 1926: 5) to dispute this identification. Newland notes in his Memoirs that many residents of the Encounter Bay district ‘were curious to

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13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

Rick Hosking know if they were the originals of the various characters. Especially was this curiosity apparent with regard to Petrel, the heroine of the tale, but in reality this paragon of women was only known to me in imagination. I had set out to create a fi ne character, embodying all the characteristics of an ideal, and it pleased me to know that the result was appreciated by others’ (1926: 162). Dr. Moorhouse was a fellow Congregationalist and close friend of Newland’s father; he migrated to Australia with the Newland family on the Sir Charles Forbes and settled near them at Yilki at Encounter Bay. The pamphlet had its origins in ‘Some Aboriginals I Have Known,’ a public lecture Newland gave in the Town Hall (Adelaide, 10 December 1894) under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian Branch), C. H. Goode presiding. The lecture was reported at length in the Register (13 December 1894: 7h). It was then printed in full in the Register over three issues (1 January 1895: 6d; 2 January 1895: 7a; 3 January 1895: 6a). It then appeared as Simpson Newland, ‘Some Aboriginals I Have Known,’ 1895, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian Branch), Session 1894–95. Newland was also president of the South Australian Zoological and Acclimatization Society from 1906 to 1923. ‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ Genesis 1:28. I am indebted to associate professor Peter Howell for this suggestion http://kingjbible.com/genesis/1.htm (accessed 8 May 2011). See, for example, R. Foster, R. Hosking and A. Nettelbeck, ‘The Legend of James Brown,’ Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory (Adelaide: Wakefield, 2001), 76. Butler was convinced that Brown was guilty as charged. ‘There is no question of the butchery or of the butcher,’ he wrote, and he also describes Brown’s victims. See the letter written by Butler to Captain Bagot, 31 May 1849, Mortlock Library D. 3746/1–3: ‘As far as Brown’s case is concerned, blame can be tolerably well laid, but as I told you before time is always difficult in native cases, and between ourselves is likely to prove fatal here to the saving of Mr Brown—there is no question of the butchery or of the butcher. In good truth however, the Magistrate has nothing to say to those matters when the man goes to prison—I have done I can [sic] just what I ought to have done under the circumstances.’ Ridgway William Newland married twice, and Watts was a child of his fi rst marriage, Simpson of his second. Watts Newland’s memoirs were published in the Register, 7 September 1906. Watts Newland is named as having ‘lost practically everything’ in a bushfi re that swept through Mount Compass, Hindmarsh Valley to Port Elliott in February 1859, which may have encouraged him to move to the south-east with the Brown brothers (Hodge 1932: 140). ‘Resident of the Fifties,’ ‘Early History—The South-Eastern Massacre,’ Register, 18 October 1906: 6g. As Elizabeth Webby’s researches have demonstrated, James Fenimore Cooper’s works appear in Australian colonial libraries as early as the 1820s; his titles appear with increasing frequency in book advertisements through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. By the 1840s Cooper was number four on the list of literary writers most widely advertised in the various Australian colonies, trailing only Shakespeare, Byron and Sir Walter Scott, with even more references to his works than Charles Dickens enjoyed.

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REFERENCES Carter, P. 1987. The Road to Botany Bay. London: Faber and Faber. Clancy, L. 1992. A Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Clendinnen, I. 2003. Dancing with Strangers. Melbourne: Text. . 2006. The History Question: Who Owns the Past? Melbourne: Black Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Furphy, J. 1903. Such is Life, Being Certain Extracts From The Diary of Tom Collins. Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper. Grenville, K. 2005. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text. Grenville, K., R. Koval and M. Shirrifs. Books and Writing. ABC Radio National, 17 July 2005. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm (accessed 15 July 2010). Healy, J. J. 1969. ‘The Treatment of the Aborigine in Australian Literature from the Beginning to the Present Day.’ PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin. . 1978/1989. Literature and the Aborigine in Australia. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Jenkin, G. K. ‘Newland, Simpson (1835–1925).’ Australian Dictionary of Biography Online. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110012b.htm (accessed 16 May 2007). Kingsley, H. 1859. The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn. Cambridge: Macmillan. Lawson, H. 1900. Verses Popular and Humorous. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. McKenna, M. 2006. ‘Writing the Past.’ In The Very Best Australian Essays, edited by D. Modjeska. Melbourne: Black, 96–110. Morris, J. 1982. The Spectacle of Empire: Style, Effect and the Pax Britannica. London: Faber and Faber. Newland, S. 1893. Paving the Way: A Romance of the Australian Bush. London: Gay and Bird. . 1893/1913. Introduction. In Paving the Way: A Romance of the Australian Bush. London: Gay and Hancock. . 1895. ‘Some Aboriginals I Have Known.’ Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian Branch) Session 1894–95. Adelaide: W. K. Thomas. . 1926. Memoirs of Simpson Newland, C.M.G. Sometime Treasurer of South Australia. Adelaide: F. W. Preece. Newland, W. 1906. ‘A Pioneer’s Story. The Coorong and the Victorian Diggings.’ Register, 7 September: 7c. Pratt, M. L. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Sinnett, F. 1969. ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia.’ In The Writer in Australia: A Collection of Literary Documents 1856 to 1964, edited by J. Barnes. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Vogan, A. J. 1902. The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia: With Illustrations and Map by the Author. London: Murray. ‘Symbolic March Unites Australia.’ BBC News, 28 May 2000. http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/low/asia-pacific/767202.stm (accessed 29 July 2010).

7

Using Lives Working with Life Stories in a Time of Revolution Nicholas Brown

AUTHENTICITY AND TRANSFORMATION The ‘democratisation of history writing’ has been, as Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, central to a ‘global revolution in historiography’ over the past five decades (2001: 68). Beginning with pioneering works in British social history, the commitment to expand the range of those whose lives fi nd inclusion in historical accounts has touched practices far more broadly. As Chakrabarty’s own field of Indian ‘subaltern history’ indicates, this influence has been inflected by local contexts, each bringing varied cultures in the production, value and use of history to bear on the ways in which lives are understood and presented. There has even been strategic collusion on the frontiers of the discipline, reworking the ‘master code’ to acknowledge the registers of ‘plurality and diversity’ among the practitioners of ‘history from below.’ And most recently, this revolution has encompassed the increasing accessibility of the historical record to less-mediated voices and memories. Bain Attwood has traced ‘an unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testimony’ in historical practice (Attwood 2008: 75). The fusing domains of historicized experience and contemporary culture have ranged from the ‘soft weapons’ of autobiographical blogging, often created (as Gillian Whitlock observes) in circumstances of personal trauma yet consumed and manipulated in the public domain (2007), to the self-advocacy with which people classified by disability seize upon the ‘age of biography’ in its many forms to confront the social construction of their identity (Goodley et al. 2004). The momentum to these processes has been considerable. They have greatly energised historical practice and awareness well beyond the spheres of what was once accepted as the discipline’s province. And they have made powerful demands for recognition, reshaping political and policy agendas. Contemporary culture—in all its registers, from the popular to the political to the scholarly—has been marked by the refrain of ‘getting a life’ and also getting a ‘history’ that will have a range of interdependent affects, from national and civic programs of

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reconciliation to the ‘therapeutic discourse’ and ‘mediated intimacy’ of the television talk show. (Peck 1996) This democratization, however, has also reshuffled some of historiography’s basic categories in ways that merit attention. For some time, questions have been raised regarding the capacity of ‘the social’ to retain meaning while accommodating such diversity, serving such purposes and accepting an emphasis on the contingent nature of historical identities (Joyce 1995). To what extent are these registers of inclusion/exclusion prone to a kind of commodification in a culture that can turn the compassion elicited by such histories into a ‘sentimental politics,’ disabling the critical, public domain of history? Such is the power of the expanding compass of history, and particularly its contemporary biographical/ autobiographical framing, that it is deployed in contexts of social fragmentation that—in Laurent Berlant’s formulation—accord priority ‘to interpersonal identification and empathy over the vitality and viability of collective life’ (1999: 51). And as Chakrabarty cautions, there may be a cost to interpretations that see identity as a ‘good’ to which one has an inherent, specific or compensatory right, rather than an entitlement secured in the paradigm of development or transcendence that was once central to history’s grand narrative (2001: 12–13). I want to investigate aspects of these processes in an Australian context, taking three examples of recent history writing. Mark Peel, Margaret Somerville and Peter Read have each explicitly and conscientiously dealt with the imperatives to inclusion in the fields of the history of poverty, environmental history and Australian Aboriginal history. They have reflected on the demands made on the integrity of their discipline in speaking for, through or with those for whom the recognized forms of historical practice are often far from ‘natural’ or easily accessible. They have worked with the lives of people they have known closely and to whom, with various levels of complexity, they acknowledge considerable debts in the research process, in their own professional and intellectual development, and in crafting/suggesting/demanding new forms of writing and advocacy. Their reflections have produced works that go beyond innovation in methodology to explore challenging styles of historical presentation. In their respective ways, Read, Somerville and Peel engage with aspects of the issues raised previously. I want to focus in particular on two related questions as they arise in their work. First, how does the imperative to democratization address the transformational paradigm at least implicit in the project of engaging with social issues from ‘below’? Each author seeks to reclaim the identities of their subjects, correcting for prevailing accounts that have excluded or stereotyped them. Each also insists on the authenticity of their subjects, the irreducible truth of their experience. Yet each also advances the case for, and possibility of, the transcendence of the injustice, silence, marginalization

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or pathology that has confronted, and defi ned, their subjects. How is the balance struck between capturing authentic identity and envisaging change in the structures that have so deeply conditioned it? Second, how does each author deal with the extent to which this authenticity is part of social processes that shape and implicate all participants? As Chakrabarty suggests, one dimension of the pursuit of genuine diversity and plurality is the development of a common ethical imperative to which all members of a history’s constituents are exposed, rather than one party being accorded a kind of essential identity and the other an ideological, instrumentalist or functional role (2001: 9). To what extent is the critical scrutiny brought to one side of the equation—in exposing, for example, practices of subjectification—also brought to the other, in accounting for the internal politics of diversity? Again, adapting Attwood’s terms, to what extent does the empathetic response that is central to seeking the inclusion of their subject in terms of their authentic experience also extend to addressing the issues of historical change and the ‘distancing’ of the subject that is central to the power of historical knowledge in actively explaining the specific conditions of difference between past and present (Attwood 2008: 92–94)? These three authors and their three works have not been chosen for detailed dissection or exegesis. Nor do they work in a common field. The ethical issues for each are distinct, arising in the politics of social welfare for Peel, the policies of racial assimilation for Read, and of environmental conservation for Somerville. Yet these differences in themselves highlight the overarching significance of these two questions, as they connect to the expanding ambit of representation in history. My intention is to deal with what each author has to offer in the choices they have made in working with their subjects. I want to place each text in its social and historiographical context, and then survey the approach taken, noting issues raised in its critical reception. This analysis will not amount to a ‘how to’ manual so much as an open reflection on the state of the revolution in historical practice as represented in these works. A disclosure: I selected these authors because each has presented at an annual workshop, Using Lives, I convene on biographical research. These workshops draw together graduate students from around Australia and New Zealand for an intensive week of discussion on biography very broadly defi ned as research that takes as its central objective the exploration of historical issues through the narrative of individual lives, or in the field of individualized experience. In exploring the pervasive ‘new cultural phenomenon’ of biography—its presence in many projects, venues, media and interventions—and the space steadily opened up by the ‘biographical turn’ in mediating between questions of identity and diversity, these workshops have tapped a keen interest among rising historians and other social-science researchers who fi nd in the concept of ‘lives’ a new purchase on their field (Donaldson 2006: 23; Chamberlayne, Bornat and Wengraf

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2000). The presentations of Read, Somerville and Peel stimulated these research students to think further, harder, more creatively and more ethically about their projects, and in terms of how such perspectives informed their own handling of issues of inclusiveness. I hope to convey something of that combined effect here.

‘YOU’LL KNOW HOW TO PUT IT SO IT SOUNDS GOOD’ Mark Peel’s The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty (2003) is driven by a dedication to understand the impact of social and economic policy on the lives of the more disadvantaged sections of the Australian population. It is the second of two books and many articles, lectures, presentations, speeches and commentaries in which Peel has made a powerful contribution to the ‘public conversation’ over welfare policy in Australia (Marston 2008: 188). His focus is on the experience of communities formed in the new suburbs of Australian cities after World War II. These were, to varying degrees, ‘model suburbs’: Elizabeth (Adelaide), Broadmeadows (Melbourne), Mount Druitt (Sydney) and Inala (Brisbane). They were planned, if with austere technocratic efficiency, to serve expectations of economic growth and a contended citizenry of industrial workers. Yet from the 1980s they provided the stage for the very different story of deindustrialisation. Many of their citizens were cast into the compartments of unemployment and dependency, with their associated neoliberal moral and policy codes, as Australian public policy turned away from protectionist precepts of national development. Peel’s research draws deeply on extensive, and extended, interviews with those who lived through this second act. He records their experiences in negotiating the parts allocated to them in the ‘badlands’ and ‘ghettos’ that tabloid headlines have savoured in late twentieth-century Australia. Although not a biographical project, it is characterized by a commitment to recount with integrity the lives of the people interviewed as a good deal more than a cipher for social decline. The context for The Lowest Rung was a growing awareness, into the new millennium, that Australia was slipping fast from its standing as a ‘social laboratory’ at the start of the preceding century. A nation that had pioneered measures in social welfare was—amid deregulation, exposure to international markets and technological change—becoming an increasingly unequal society. Australian society was marked—in Peter Saunders’ terms, from his own 2003 study—by increasing contrasts of ‘deep poverty amid affluence, of deprivation and wealth, of exclusion and privilege, of discrimination and opportunity’ (3). This polarization was most graphically conveyed by qualitative rather than quantitative surveys: how did Australians understand and feel about the decline they were experiencing? An ‘age of anxiety’ was identified and popularized as expectations failed and insecurities multiplied (Mackay 1993). And that ‘anxiety’ set the terms for one aspect, if an ironic

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one, of the forces for democratization in historically informed reflections on welfare: how was the new face of marginalization—captured in the ‘subjective perceptions’ (Saunders 2003: 4) of those both drawn into practices of public testimony yet forced to the edges of disenchantment with welfarism—to be accommodated in political culture? Several influential surveys that appeared around the time Peel was meeting and talking to the residents of those three suburbs focused on the trauma experienced by Australians as their ideas and ideals of ‘society’ were seen to be atomized into the logic of ‘the economy’ (Pusey 2003: xiv). The focus on these surveys—on ‘anxiety’ and a perception of betrayal—was explained by their authors’ contention that economic change itself had fractured older collectivities of work, class and culture into fragmented, alienated, individualized states. It was also suggested that the form of this research— the interview and opinion poll—was in itself required by, and reflected, the information-rich contexts in which Australians lived and the need to reach into their more private domains of experience, both to ascertain their mood and to make an impact on their attitudes. In these ways, such inquiries gave as well as reflected a primacy to interpersonal identification over collective life. And to this effectively self-fulfi lling argument was added the point that the residual legitimacy accorded to social and economic reform now depended on the extent to which individuals in crucial sectors of society understood and calculated the costs and benefits of social polarization to themselves, in their own fractured civic identities, and not part of a social contract (Saunders 2003: 4–5). There was no point invoking a higher cause. Social welfare was seen to have comprehensively failed those who saw themselves as paying for it, to have become increasingly restricted for those who received it, and overall to have become a mean game played in the moralizing discourses such as mutual obligation. The Lowest Rung seeks to frame an ethical position and research process that engages with as well as critiques these trends. Like each of the works covered here, it is a passionate book and reflects openly on the journey Peel took in its researching and writing. Fundamentally, Peel is committed to telling ‘the story they [the residents of those suburbs] wanted told’ (2003: 4). His objective is not to interpret, balance or contextualize these testimonies but to ‘bear witness’ to them: ‘to do justice to the complicated, careful stories’ shared with him (2003: 5). The figure of ‘the story’ itself is at the heart of this book as a richly textured, often strategic performance. These stories, as narratives both of self and directed towards others, work in opposition to the popularized state of subjective anxiety seen as so prevalent in surveys of the social mood. They offered instead an active assertion of meaning and order, even if in a calculated subversion of prevailing discourses, and they often constructed a clear, even strategic sense of those to whom the stories were addressed. Building on such testimony, Peel seeks ‘to produce a polyphonic portrait,’ believing that ‘done well it could move hearts and change minds’ (2003: 9).

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Three elements characterize Peel’s approach. First, the story has an irreducible truth and immediacy. He begins by confiding his initial mistake in thinking ‘that you know the story when what you must do is listen.’ At several points he returns to this insistence, including excerpts from conversations in which Peel’s own learning is evident: ‘Right. Sorry. I see what you’re saying’ (2003: 73). Listening to his taped conversations, he notes: ‘I can hear myself trying to offer reassurance by talking about the structural causes of disadvantage’ (2003: 79)—gestures with no place in the transaction, neither personally nor professionally. ‘It took me a while to realise how to let them speak their anger rather than deflecting it with a reassuring word or gesture’ (2003: 89). Second, all stories are constructed and should be understood as acts, intentions, claims and defences. The Lowest Rung engages with stories that are embellished or framed, that are drawn selectively from the past to serve a purpose, or—as noted—crafted with a specific audience or effect in mind. ‘So, what do you want to hear?’ one conversation begins, and it becomes clear, as Peel argues, that the experience of poverty provides its own repertory of stories on which to draw: stories to conform to expectations of how to qualify for support, to seem grateful and compliant—of how to ‘act poor’—as well as stories that reclaim a sense of personal and collective defiance (2003: 75). He emphasizes the ways in which stories provide forms of solidarity, invoke codes of respect or rehearse narratives of injustice. At the few points at which he draws back from working closely with these conversations to engage with questions of interpretation, it is to anthropology he turns, to understand patterns in the use of customs, managing conflict in social hierarchies: stories as structured performance (2003: 42–43). Through his research, Peel writes, he came to know these stories well and to appreciate the purposes they served. Third, Peel is very explicitly an author, with a sense of the trust placed in him by those with whom he spoke and by the power of the account he will produce. ‘Don’t lie, don’t just make it up,’ he is told by one Inala resident, ‘but tell them everything. You’ll know how to put it so it sounds good. They have to know what it’s like because we can’t change things’ (2003: 15). This sense of the capacity, even responsibility, of historical writing to force change—to couple authenticity and transformation—runs throughout The Lowest Rung. The book itself is a highly crafted text, with a rhetoric and analysis that seeks to maximize the appeal of its account to readers, both as a medium for the testimony of the poor and also as a work of advocacy. It builds on an insistence that such testimony represents a social resilience in its form as much as its content. The book begins with an autobiographical association: Peel himself had grown-up in Elizabeth, ‘a member of a fortunate group, a working class generation born in the 1950s and early 1960s’ who moved out and did not face the economic collapse that came in the 1980s (2003: 2). But it then adopts other modes of generating a tension between familiarity and confrontation, between the

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ease of empathy and the jarring evocation of social and personal conditions that lie implicitly beyond the space in which such a book might be read. Peel deploys pronouns, for example, to play on the tensions of identification implicit within the narrative: ‘When you’re impoverished,’ he writes, ‘that is what you wake up with every morning and struggle to sleep against every night’ (2003: 70). The ‘you’ here offers a subtle form of interrogation, breaking with modes of pervasive ‘anxiety’ to anchor the text in an implicit challenge: Do you presume to know what poverty is like? By way of contrast, the emotional weight of the interview process only rarely comes directly into the text, as in this pause in a conversation with ‘Marianne,’ a welfare officer, as she recounts a campaign organized among Mt. Druitt’s residents: ‘I’m getting very emotional about this, sorry. It’s very hard. Just give me a minute’ (2003: 54). Here, the authorial gaze is averted for the sake of a mutual dignity, as the relationship between subject and reader is renegotiated around a code of respect. Peel implicitly evokes the intrusions familiar enough from the lingering camera gaze of the talk show or the ‘personal angle’ of reportage, but in a way that heightens the presumption of intimacy by placing this pause in the context of the social solidarity Marianne has observed at a distance as she seeks to provide the meagre assistance at her disposal. Marianne continues, ‘It was very humbling. If only you could bottle it.’ This inversion of a stereotype—the welfare officer who falters in emotion, rather than recipient who collapses in on his or her own failings (Peck 1996: 142)—is a writerly act, revealing an insistence running through Peel’s text. In The Lowest Rung the stories of the poor are organized primarily around the objectified registers of hope, anger, suffering and loss—emotions that, unlike anxiety, gesture to referents beyond themselves, implying relationships rather than internalized states. Peel takes it as central to his responsibilities ‘as a historian’ to ensure that these voices are heard within that discipline’s implicit ethical project of ‘hope and change’ (2003: 179). These three elements provide the framework within which questions of transformation and authenticity are addressed in The Lowest Rung. The stories are allowed their own ‘intricate choreography’ while retaining ‘truth’ in part because of their cleverness. They convey a shared condition, a stance against the more powerful official or public narratives the poor confront, whether in tabloid headlines, at social security counters or in glib figures of speech such as ‘the underclass.’ When Peel moves to question this resilience, it is with an eye to a faltering in that capacity for authenticity, which is essentially political. So, for example, after recounting the ‘heroes’ erected by these communities—those who stood up for change and who were often celebrated with a good deal of imaginative licence—he seeks to ‘challenge the dominance’ of such depictions: ‘However important they [the accounts of heroism] are in local life, they cannot have the last word’, for to leave the story in the figure of

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the hero ‘is to ask everything’ of such legends ‘and nothing of the powerful.’ (2003: 61) Equally, he notes that stories of heroes often had hard edges, as ‘vindication . . . could become vindictive’ in casting around for those (often defi ned by race or ethnicity) who did not fit the momentarily pure ideal of a community triumphant in the leadership of iconic individuals. The fabrication of heroes, Peel judges, is a point at which as an author he must intervene, to put a context to the story, even to gesture towards correction: ‘Gough Whitlam (Labor prime minister in 1972–75) might be pleased to know that services built by conservative governments . . . in the 1960s . . . have been gathered into the pantheon of his achievements’ (2003: 55). And in these instances, Peel is also keen to let the conversation run on, under more active guidance—to ‘listen, to ask questions and to ask for more’—in the belief that the ultimate point of reference, not ‘a particular cultural identity’ but a shared ‘entrenched hardship’ (2003: 11). Put in these terms, The Lowest Rung makes very specific claims for the ‘democratization’ it brings to history, and the ‘transformation’ to which it gestures. Like Carolyn Steedman, Peel does not rely on invocations of an inherent ‘working class’ collectivity but insists on ‘the social specificity’ of the stories people make and tell. And he also urges a critical reflection on how those stories might be ‘used’ (Steedman 1986: 7). Heroes, as in the passage just cited, don’t necessarily tell the full story; their celebration must be challenged for the sake a more complete understanding of the limits within which such figures emerge and act. Equally, when noting issues of gender, Peel traces the dynamics within its performance rather than applying the concept as a given category for analysis. If women tell better stories of poverty than men, it is not that they are more or less ‘true’ but that they are strategic, reflecting the circumstances women balance in homes, schools, streets, queues, shops and workplaces. All these stories might be artefacts, but that is part of their integrity: they negotiate across boundaries, with an eye to outcomes rather than fi xed positions. Peel positions the authenticity of these stories on a fine point of social advocacy, not claiming to recover a culture that has an existence outside the processes explored, but insisting nonetheless on the bonds of solidarity among the poor. Yet, reflecting Chakrabarty’s insistence on an equal scrutiny of all the actors in the scene, how fully are these processes accounted for? The stories Peel relates, and occasionally follows through their apparent prejudice until they fi nd an ‘invariable’ (2003: 153) sense of justice, are not set against equivalent testimony from ‘the other side’—from welfare workers, planners or bureaucrats. Such figures remain remote and abstract, representing the rationalism of bureaucracy’s ‘strict’ economy or the architectural allure of fashion and ‘ingenuity’ in providing housing deemed appropriate to working-class suburbs (2003: 43, 46). Peel confronts the state, or policy, in these guises with the statement that the communities

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he visits are not ‘social disasters’ that reflect the failings of residents but ‘planning disasters,’ their failure being inherent within the policies imposed on them (2003: 48). Yet this polarization of the social world of the historical subject and the planning domain of the state sets aside the historical interdependence between the two. These model suburbs had their origins in earlier acts of planning associated with a political economy that sought to foster class transcendence in home ownership, the nuclear family’s bargain of domesticity and stable employment in regulated industries (Murphy 2000: 144). The failure of this regime was not only ideological, just as the formations it once sought to support, with whatever compromise, were not purely authentic. Both subject and state are implicated in the same historically conditioned problems, whether in the liberal ideal of welfare or the neoliberal reprise of the market. It is, however, only the ingenuity of the stories told by the poor that is given authenticity in Peel’s account, leaving unquestioned the assumptions underpinning that earlier political economy not only in relation to welfare but also to its accompanying social norms and roles. The closest Peel comes to a mediating voice—a voice that speaks of official reflection on these processes—is that of a Catholic priest who sees these suburbs of ‘places of prophecy,’ where the future of Australia might be anticipated (Peel 2003: 2), not where the past is to be reassessed. In this, the authenticity of testimony—even in its tactical inventiveness—can seem abstracted from the historical processes that provided its preconditions. And such prophecy is (as Wendy Brown warns) informed by a reaction against policy, by a localized resistance to its actions and ‘injuries,’ but not by sustained political engagement with its historical power (Brown 1995: 10). Such a judgement might seem preciously academic given the public impact of The Lowest Rung. It does, however, go the core of the transformational aspects of the ‘democratization of history’ the book represents: the appeal to the historical account as a way of envisaging a break with practices of marginalization and approaching an ideal of, in Peel’s case, social justice. The point is not to reduce that ideal to historical relativism, but (adapting Chakrabarty’s terms) to consider the extent to which justice is understood as a ‘good’ denied and ‘to be acquired’ by specific groups/identities, or even as a good inherent within those identities and demanding recognition, or envisaged instead as a project undertaken within a historical paradigm that actively questions the constitution of those identities with reference to prevailing matrices of political economy. As Chakrabarty insists, this is not necessarily a question of good or bad historical practice but one about the ‘use’ to which such practice might be put in addressing Peel’s objectives of ‘hope and change.’ Peel’s insistence on ‘the importance of being very, very honest about poverty’ has been valued for confronting the technocratic dominance of a field such as housing research with ‘a rich understanding of how people

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make sense of their lives in a period of public housing decline’ (Marston 2008: 186–87). Also noting Peel’s influence, Jenny Cameron and Katherine Gibson have indicated the importance of redressing an imbalance in social analysis that arises when only one side of the welfare equation is problematized. As they argue, those outside the paid economy are always seen in deficit, as deviant or dysfunctional within the prevailing terms of government and policy. No account is taken, they argue, of the ways in which nonmarket transactions maintain concepts and practices of ‘society’ that are increasingly important to the functioning of communities within and beyond ‘our so-called capitalist economy’ (Cameron and Gibson 2005: 29). The stories Peel presents resist one version of ‘prophecy’—that of chronic, systemic marginalization—and point to another, in which such new roles and responsibilities take shape and demand recognition. But, again, as Cameron and Gibson argue, to embrace the second requires a rethinking of historical dynamics in the inter-relationships of social, economy and state that lie beyond the polarities Peel sometimes implies. Even so, the lessons of Peel’s approach can be contrasted to what is, in many ways, a parallel text: Michael Pusey’s The Experience of Middle Australia, also published in 2003, that influenced as well as reflected the ‘anxiety’ dimension of Australian social analysis at that time. Rather than ‘listening’ to stories, Pusey sought to ‘give voice’ to more than four hundred Australians who were interviewed in depth about their experience of ‘economic reform’ through the 1980s and 1990s. A sociologist, he drew on these transcripts to argue that a class identity, once secure in ‘one of the most peaceful, plural and dynamic democracies in the world,’ had been ‘hollowed out’ by neoliberal policies (2003: 122, 183). Deregulation and an ethic of open competition had left in their wake individualized aspirations and fears without clear structures of community support. The people Pusey speaks for have experienced, as he terms it, a dislocation between their ‘internal and external orientations to the world’; they have to negotiate the ‘fragile and unstable boundaries between different spheres of life’ (2003: 107). Given this trauma, the ‘voice’ Pusey bestows on his subjects relies heavily on impressionistic typologies, borrowing from tabloid headlines, political rhetoric and social cliché. The equivalent identities attributed to the ‘underclass,’ which Peel sought to expose are, in Pusey, deployed as categories in themselves. He describes lives in which ‘some basic proteins of social experience [have been subsumed] into a purely personal, and largely incommunicable, world of private striving and experience’ (2003: 44). The contrasts in language and assumption between Pusey’s approach and Peel’s reveal more than the differences between the postcodes each researcher has traversed or the disciplines they practice. Both texts respond to similar issues, although Pusey’s focus on the middle class essentially looks over their shoulders to dissect the failing legitimacy of the state, whereas Peel deals with the lived experience of change amid poverty that leaves the state with an inherent deficit in legitimacy. An ethic of ‘bearing witness’ shapes in Peel

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an account seeking to articulate what the participants ‘wanted to say, what they could see happening, and what they hoped might yet happen.’ For Pusey, the authenticity of testimony is subsumed in synonym, analogy and symbol. At one point he writes of ‘people, again with no tertiary education, relating what we might call trade policy to their own understand of political economy’ (2003: 140): the ‘we’ and ‘they’ marking out/reinforcing distinct domains not only in the text, but in the ‘use’ to which the text might be put. As Berlant suggests, what is significant about a culture that defuses political questioning into testimony is not the act of such expression itself, but the processes of its reception and the categories applied in rendering such experience familiar for consumption (Berlant 1999). Even the contrast between Peel’s gesture (‘when you’re poor’) and Pusey’s (‘what we might call’) mark out a basic choice in terms of ethics and integrity. Authenticity and transformation fi nd little place within Pusey’s characterization of this loss of certainty. The differences between his account and Peel’s reveal what is enabled and determined by basic questions of representation and terms of inclusion.

‘MISSING THE MANTLE OF KATHLEEN’S PROTECTION’ The historical democratization of the field of social welfare—as The Lowest Rung suggests—demands an attention both to the strategic resourcefulness of those who negotiate through its discourses and also a constructive engagement with the redefi nition of the field itself, with its own repositionings of the relations between government, markets and citizens (Marston 2008: 186). Turning to environmental history and Margaret Somerville’s Wildflowering (Somerville 2004), similar observations can be made. Somerville’s is, as the title itself suggests, a very different text. But the issues it raises are related to common factors in the reorientation of history writing with which we are concerned here. The environment, too, has come in from the margins of historical writing, bringing with it another series of emphases on attending to experience and testimony. The democratization of environmental history is most evident in the turn to those voices that attribute significance to places on the basis of a sense of belonging or attachment that to some extent predates exploitative practices. Chakrabarty’s own field of subaltern history was itself informed by an early engagement with environmental themes, addressing ‘issues of access to and control over resources’ (Rajan 1997: 148) in the context of colonial resistance. But beyond the registers set by engaging with the larger historical themes of colonialism, the rise of environmental history has, in its own way, reflected aspirations to expand the representation of experience from ‘below,’ often framed at local scales and couched in terms of an intensity of association with the environment that is contrasted to those practices imposed ‘from above.’ How does such writing seek to rise above

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the contingent nature of attachments to place and articulate environmental value as shaped within historical processes, while also engaging with the transformational challenge of addressing ecological impact or advancing environmental sustainability within or beyond these succeeding systems? A mature environmental history, as Heather Goodall cautions, must avoid essentializing one side of the historical equation as ‘natural’ or authentic in contrast to the other, which is locked within its own cultural construction, ideological stasis or monolithic power (2008: 11). As the field has developed in Australia, it has been marked by a close attention to the ‘stories’ that have mediated the relationship of people and landscape, and constructed the meanings of landscapes themselves. Such attention is not peculiar to Australian writing, but it does have pronounced Australian dimensions. These practices reflect the processes of settler colonization by a literate, increasingly diverse and technologically empowered immigrant society, the engagement of those settlers with an unfamiliar landscape and ecology that is made even more ‘weird’ in its juxtaposition to their imported and imposed modernity. The highly textual nature of Australian experience of the environment—the search for a language of comprehension—has often been emphasized (Bonyhady and Griffiths 2002). ‘Stories about nature,’ as Paul Sinclair writes, ‘make up a great part of public and private discourse in Australia’ (2001: 22). And those stories are inflected by a contest between the assumptions brought to colonized, settled, contested landscapes, and values cast in terms of personalized associations and vernacular, traditional or innate knowledge. The incorporation of Aboriginal voices has heightened this trend as the stories of traditional owners are attributed the significance of being ‘an integral part’ of the landscape in contrast to settlers’ stories about it (Weir 2009: 3). Again, although such practices might not be unique to Australia, they have a certain ethical cast as environmental historians have sought to recover the landscape in its specificity from the more generalized mission and homogeneity imposed as part of Australia’s self-consciously nation-building project (Robin 2007). Paul Carter, for example, has recently adopted the concept of topographical practice—Montaigne’s term for the work of those ‘who would provide first-hand accounts of places they really visited and knew intimately’ (Carter 2010:2) —to his own work on an Australian region. As he explains, Ground Truthing, his book on the Mallee in western Victoria ‘is confined to what [he has] come across for [himself]’: As far as possible I have tried to exclude what ‘everybody knows’. The reason this is plausible is that the ‘special knowledge’ I found as I pored over certain story-lines or sought to follow them up in the field, is that the Mallee is a creative region. Beneath the rational surface of roads, nodal towns—and their corollary, statistical information about the climate, the annual yields, the cyclical fluctuations in the narrative of regional development—is an underlay of unedited anecdote, a fi ne

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These oppositions and Carter’s recourse—a little like Pusey—to a language of analogy and symbolism, reflect an attempt to render an authenticity of place amid ‘forces of cultural, economic and even environmental globalisation’ (Carter 2010: 4), and to appreciate the ways in which places are ‘made after stories’ (2010: 14). They also relate in distinctive ways to the challenge of transformation through historical writing—in the case of Carter’s Mallee, the desire to bring clarity to ‘the conditions of place-making and place-loss’ (2010: 20). Somerville’s Wildfl owering—although a work of almost intimate scale (or because of that scale)—can be read as addressing those issues. The book is a biographical study of Kathleen McArthur (1915–2000), a southeast Queensland environmental activist and artist. McArthur was a self-taught painter who specialized in studying, painting and propagating wildflowers from the coastal heathland around her home at Caloundra, ninety kilometres north of Brisbane. In 1962 she joined Judith Wright, an already nationally renowned poet; David Fleay, a naturalist; and Brian Clouston, a publisher, to found the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and launch a magazine, Wildlife Australia. The organization and its journal would both support highly influential conservation campaigns, including lobbying for the creation of Cooloola National Park, to the north of Caloundra, to protect the world’s largest intact sanddune system from mining and cattle grazing. McArthur’s work extended to campaigns over the Great Barrier Reef, further to the north, but was primarily focused on activities too readily lost from the bigger stories of environment combat. Her attention was given to school programs and educational field trips; on monthly lunch-hour theatre productions of her own scripts to raise awareness of environmental, biographical and history subjects; and on several volumes of writings and artworks that drew on her own life and her immediate sense of place. Subtitled ‘The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur,’ Somerville’s book engages with the position of the author both as a listener to the story McArthur tells of herself and her work and also as a figure actively engaging with her own ‘place biography’ of the coastal areas around Caloundra, Noosa and Lake Cootharaba. As Somerville writes, ‘I saw in Kathleen a chance to look to our white fore-mothers to fi nd out how they constructed a sense of belonging in this colonial landscape’ (Somerville 2004: 5). Each element of this formulation is carefully weighted. The ‘look to’ conveys Somerville’s conviction that there is something to be learned from such ‘fore-mothers,’ which she explores as a distinctively ‘female way of knowing’ an environment: ‘an ethic and a set of practices based on home, the local, the embodied and the direct, daily interactions with the landscape,’

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to be implicitly contrasted to the more public, and dominant, masculine appropriations of environmental confl ict. The ‘chance’ indicates an opportunity to catch a passing form of environmental engagement, reflected in the experience of those who found their way into activism through amateur experience and observation—and who could only anticipate that in time their children might use ‘the scientific word . . . ecologist’ to describe the knowledge they drew together in a largely self-directed way (Somerville 2004: 189).‘White’ and ‘colonial’ situate these ‘place’ practices in a distinct context, a presence in the landscape that Somerville values for its power as an ‘ethic’ of belonging but also as a construction of attitudes that have their own specificity. They are also terms that locate this book alongside Somerville’s other work, in which she has reconstructed a sense of place with Aboriginal women—work that, she notes, ‘raised unresolved business’ for McArthur herself (Somerville 2004: 6). If this is ‘topography’ in Carter’s sense, it is also a practice not characterized by a polarization of the ‘rational’ and the experiential or by a distancing from ‘what “everybody knows,”’ but one enmeshed in distinct sociabilities, sensibilities and skills. Somerville reconstructs these factors with economy. McArthur was the daughter of a prosperous ‘self-made man,’ an engineer who built a holiday house named the Restorer overlooking King’s Beach, Caloundra. From this house, Somerville records: The landscape is offered up to the gaze. Everything can be seen—and in being seen, possessed. Positioned on the highest point of the headland with no other houses to block the view, they could see everything up and down the coast—the islands, mountains, Pumicestone Passage. (2004: 91) In fundamental ways, Somerville notes, this advantage implicitly informs McArthur’s own practice. Her reworking of her father’s ethos of ‘get-upand-go’ development informs her own initiatives in building conservation campaigns. Somerville writes: ‘But when I ask her if her father won her heart she says, “Not quite, I was too like him”. Independent, distant, I wonder, not giving her heart to anyone’ (2004: 92). As this passage indicates, Wildflowering’s text moves through an interweaving of perspectives. Whereas Peel positions himself as ‘bearing witness’ to stories of poverty, Somerville offers a more personally inflected, reflexive prose. The text is based on transcribed conversations, on memories constructed in interaction, on reflections on the act of speaking or not speaking. Somerville does not confront McArthur’s pride or reticence: a marriage that ended in divorce in 1947 is not mentioned, nor are three children, although they are perhaps shadowed in the ‘loneliness’ that emerges in McArthur’s dedicated life. The progression of McArthur’s dementia is noted as part of the fabric of her life rather than its unravelling. Overall, the book concentrates on the account McArthur offers of coming to care for place and Somerville’s reconstruction of that care.

122 Nicholas Brown These reservations might seem to defeat the biographer’s customary pursuit of linearity: the life unfolding. But they accord with Somerville’s intentions. She is cautious to avoid subscribing to an ‘over-determined’ sense of ‘the environment,’ and perhaps also of the ‘life,’ tracing instead the constitution of values in the ‘home, the local, the embodied and the direct daily interactions with the landscape’ (Somerville 2004: 2). She also notes the forms in which McArthur evoked and defended that sense of place—in art, in writing, in performance as well as in walking, swimming and cooking. Somerville’s reconstruction of such ‘place practices’ is not only directed to including a subject such as McArthur, and a ‘female way of knowing,’ in the mix of environmental history and biography. They also allow for reflection on questions of transformation, as Somerville’s testing of her own role as author positions the environment itself as a subject of historical reflection. ‘How do we speak of the passion, the pleasure, the ethics of care?’ Somerville asks, and moves to address this question in her own extended engagement with the places McArthur valued (Somerville 2004: 172). In this, Somerville notes those points at which her entry into that landscape differs from McArthur’s and is even made possible, for example, by elements of the coastal development McArthur opposed. Lacking the early, proprietorial gaze of the Restorer, Somerville records that her actions in writing McArthur’s life—her visits, mobility, the assistance on which she draws as an author, including that of ecologist Kris Plowman—implicitly mark a difference in their worlds: There have been massive dispossessions. Kathleen is sad that the fishing shack is gone, but if it were still here, I couldn’t sit watching the water with all the other people who sit here and take in the beauty of the Passage. (2004: 126) ‘Missing the mantle of Kathleen’s protection’ in these moments, Somerville also experiences the compromises wrought in contemporary practices of environmental management. She records those boundaries of aesthetics and sensibility that are now easily violated with a less-privileged experience of ‘the local’ than McArthur enjoyed (2004: 213). In this approach, the transformational elements of the historical project are weighed in balance: what is learned, what is lost, what mediates between the past and present. Somerville explicitly seeks, like Peel, a language to ‘bear witness’ to her subject. But she moves beyond Peel’s sense of responsibility within a discipline to advance a methodology more attuned to an ‘undoing of the self’ in the process of research and writing in the broader context of academic work (Somerville 2007: 235). Peel’s strategies of implicating the reader— ‘you still had to struggle for the things other people took for granted’—are for Somerville a more extended exercise in uncovering ‘a genealogy of the present’: a series of intimate practices in which the subject is experienced

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in its continuities as well as disruptions (2004: 227) with the life of the author. It is not only the authenticity of the subject that is significant here but also the explicit, reflexive presence of the author following behind that subject, sometimes stumbling, questioning and gaining her own independent perspective. For Somerville—as noted—this presence in part reflects her experience in previous work with Aboriginal women, in which the meanings of testimony and history had to negotiate cultural and political inequalities in many ways more profound than those confronting Peel, but also open to experimentation, reflection and reciprocity. In an earlier work, Somerville recorded an exchange with Aboriginal women near Coonabarabran in western New South Wales, where an element of play with popularized, even commodified images of Aboriginal culture (‘the Dreamtime’) moves into a more profound exchange over how a more formally sanctioned historical record has its own value for communities keen to preserve an already deeply disrupted past: Margaret: Tell me how you want to put it in the beginning? Marie: You put it how you wanta. Maureen: Say, ‘Long ago in the dreamtime’, eh? (laughing) Marie: We don’t wanta tell you how to do it, Margaret: We want you to do it and bring it back to us (Somerville 1999: 10). If this exchange recalls the trust invested in Peel (‘You’ll know how to put it so its sounds good’) the differences are also striking. For these Aboriginal women, the text is not just a plea to others (‘they have to know what it’s like’) but also returns, transformed, and with different uses in the phases of democratization. Such an exchange has distinct elements in dealing with oral culture but is present also in Wildflowering: the conversations, reflections, excursions and reservations; the desire to convey that ‘female way of knowing the environment.’ As Somerville notes, she sought through Wildflowering to bring an Aboriginal ‘ritual of landscape’ as well as a ‘female way of knowing’ into an engagement with Australian environmental history, to create a ‘contact zone’ that explicitly registers a fully historicized meeting of such ‘stories.’ Her subsequent work has continued to explore these processes of ‘cultural translation,’ suspending judgement on what is lost or gained in changing patterns of ‘transmitting cultural knowledge’ but emphasizing goals of shared education (Somerville and Perkins 2010: 12). These features of Somerville’s work have attracted considerable appreciation. In pushing beyond models of the ‘social construction of nature’—landscape as shaped through the symbolic investments made in it as a reflection of social identity, serially ‘raced, classed, gendered and nationalised’—Somerville is seen to have developed a inclusive approach marked by an understanding of diverse landscape practices in place of a ‘them/us’ polarization and that integrates environmental awareness into a

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range of civic, social and personal activities rather than a ‘nature-as-other’ model (Ferres 2005: 112). Somerville has also reflected separately on these aspects of her method, arguing that researchers must fi rst seek to answer the question ‘where are you in this research?’ (2007: 228) by interrogating ‘the relationship between our research activities and data collection and the conclusions we draw’ (2007: 227). In this process, as Wildflowering shows, easy oppositions and resolved identities will inevitably come into question, and that questioning in itself becomes central to the project.

‘WE ARE STILL BEING SLICED UP’ In The Lowest Rung Peel wrote with a sense of an explicit professional calling to be concerned not only with the past ‘but always about what might be.’ That responsibility mattered to those who trusted him with their testimony, and the book reflects on how best to act on that trust (Peel 2003: 179). In Wildflowering, Somerville steps further outside strict scholarly parameters but still discusses questions of research methodology in ways that are framed in a professional, collegial mode. In Peter Read’s Tripping Over Feathers (2009), these departures are more pronounced and reflect a very different response to the challenges of ‘democratization’ and of capturing the testimony of diverse lives. Read’s book is a biographical study of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams (1942–2006), a Wiradjuri woman who was removed from her mother as a young child as a result of the directives of the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board to ‘protect’ children identified as ‘half-caste.’ Williams’s mother, Doretta, had also been taken away from her family. Joy’s childhood commenced in a series of institutions established to train such children for employment beyond the perceived inevitable decline of Aboriginal communities, but her ‘light’ skin and intelligence meant she was given considerable education opportunities until the emergence of psychological disorders had her placed in a sequence of psychiatric care. She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter who was also removed from her while she was under sedation. Williams eventually made contact with Doretta, studied at the University of Wollongong, worked for a range of Aboriginal agencies and gained recognition as a poet. She was closely associated with Link-Up, an organization established in 1983 to support removed children and to assist in reuniting them with their parents, if desired. As a prominent member of the ‘stolen generations,’ Williams launched the fi rst test case against the New South Wales State Government for negligence in her own removal and for the abuse she endured in state institutions. In 1999 her case was dismissed in the Supreme Court of NSW and in 2001 lost in the Court of Appeal. Read, one of the founders of Link-Up, came to know Williams well, and as the historian largely responsible for generating public awareness of the ‘stolen generations’ policy and its impact, he agreed to write her

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biography. But the task of bringing Williams’s life into a text that could comprehend the complexities of her personality, her experience and her significance demanded of Read a fundamental rethinking of questions relating to the conventions of such a form. As with each of the texts discussed here, there is a context to be sketched. The democratization of history arrived most powerfully in Australia with the publicity generated by awareness of the extent of the ‘stolen generations’ legacy. This process in itself was in large part enabled by the cultural alignment to testimony that developed from the 1980s onwards. The clearest expression of this alignment came in mid-1997 when, as Gillian Whitlock recalls, ‘Australians were immersed in an ocean of testimony’ (Whitlock 2010: 2) The release of the report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission into the removal of Aboriginal children from the families, titled Bringing Them Home, generated an overwhelming public response. As Whitlock notes: The Commission listened to 535 personal stories of forcible removal, and had access to another thousand or so. The Commissioners travelled through the country gathering testimonies, listening and reading. Their report ‘retained as far as possible the actual words as they had heard them’: Bringing Them Home was built around fi rst-person life stories, and its impact derived directly from their power. These stories were extensively quoted in the press, read in tears in parliament, and quickly became a part of national awareness. (2001: 198) The authenticity of these voices—even in their anonymity—demanded attention. The day the report was released was designated ‘National Sorry Day’—‘sorry’ encompassing the adoption of the English word by many Aboriginal languages to describe the rituals surrounding death (‘sorry business’) and refer to acts of empathy or sympathy rather than the acceptance or attribution of personal responsibility. It spurred calls for an apology from the Australian government for its treatment of its indigenous population. Whitlock argues that Bringing Them Home required all Australians to own racialized identities—to become aware of the historical implications of being either white or black—and drew much of its power from the image of the child, a figure whose innocence, carrying no complexity of history, stood in contrast to resolute perfidy of history itself (Whitlock 2001: 203). In the Australian context, Attwood argues, the ‘stolen generations’ testimony—the circumstances of both its expression and reception— reflected a particular aspect of the democratization of history (2008: 89–90). As Chakrabarty had noted, ‘memory and history tell of very different relationships to the past,’ and in this case the extremity of ‘stolen generations’ experience created a kind of gulf between a past that could foster such practices and a present that felt such outrage at them (2001: 5). The power of this testimony—its undoubted authenticity—to some

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extent cancelled out or overwhelmed the issue of transformation as the explanation of such brutal, and as many saw it, even genocidal practices disrupted the continuum of history. This issue was politicized, not only in the refusal of the then-prime minister, John Howard, to apologize for acts for which he argued his government was not itself responsible, but also in the extent to which the stories invoked practices other than historicism— the therapeutic or the juridical, for example—for their comprehension. As ‘Confidential evidence 580, Queensland’ stated in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) report: It never goes away. Just ‘cause we’re not walking around on crutches or with bandages or plasters on our legs and arms, doesn’t mean we’re not hurting. Just ’cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not true . . . I suspect I’ll carry these sorts of wounds ’til I the day I die. I’d just like it to be not quite as intense, that’s all. (HREOC 1997: 178) It was in this context that Read sought the most effective way to present his portrait of Williams. Two fundamental choices mark Read’s book. First, it is written as ‘scenes from a life,’ a series of ‘imaginative reconstructions’ of crucial points in Williams’s biography rather a linear narrative. These ‘scenes’ draw on Read’s conversations with Williams and members of her family, on case files and on Read’s own close involvement with both the history and the policies that shaped Williams’s life. In presenting this approach, Read argues that ‘the line between fiction and non-fiction is already, among biographers as well as historians, becoming indistinct,’ and that Tripping Over Feathers can be seen in the context of debates over that ‘line’ in recent years (2009: xxiii). Read provides an outline of the sources that informed and verify each of these scenes, but the text is presented in a style that mixes third-person contemporaneous observation (‘She sighs deeply . . . Another cigarette’) and direct speech, including the equivalent of stage directions (‘Joy is on her feet, shouting’). The book is written in a way that lends itself directly to performance—a form Read often adopts in presentations of his work. In this practice, Read is building on a trajectory in his writing in which he has sought to bring ‘emotions and intuitions,’ and reflective authorial questioning, into the compass of history. He has, for example, studied emotions of attachment and loss in dealing with the meanings of place in Australia. Critics have noted that Read seems too ready to accept that it is only registers of trauma or transcendence that issues of attachment and identity become authentic (Gelder 2000: 24), but equally it is those moments of trauma that most engage his interest. From one perspective, Tripping Over Feathers takes this approach to an extreme. In these ostensibly unmediated scenes, Williams’s life is conveyed with harrowing immediacy in its drunkenness, pathos, self-destructiveness and emotional violence towards others. From another, however, these scenes explicitly beg

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the question: How are we to make sense of such behaviour? Read confesses to the ‘fierce ambiguity’ he still feels regarding Williams’s personality after years of often difficult friendship and concedes that there may well be others who can more effectively understand her experience, framed as it was by searing creativity, drug abuse, psychiatric intervention and abandonment. The ‘scenes,’ to some extent, reflect this desire to pull back from judgement. ‘But who are we,’ Williams asks Peter in a recreated conversation: ‘In a genetic way we know who we are, but we are still being sliced up again. Never ends. Does it?’ (Read 2009: 11). This remark, mirrored in the organization of the text, effectively repositions the question of authenticity as an active interrogation within the book overall. Read’s second choice relates to a more fundamental reordering of the text so that the ‘scenes’ run in reverse chronological order. The book’s preamble is the 2003 Supreme Court decision on Williams’s appeal for damages. In his judgement, Chief Justice Spigelman determined that whether or not the state had intervened in Joy’s life, ‘her fate is not likely to have been pleasant.’ Adding his personal reservations regarding a contemporary culture that demonstrated ‘an increasing trend to avoid responsibility for one’s predicament’ (Read 2000: xxxv), Spigelman effectively set up the challenge Read addresses: how best to convey a life that needs to be pulled out of such a calculus if it is to be understood. Chapter one is an account of Williams’s funeral in 2006, and from that point the text treks backwards in time. As Read insists, both as a representative of a systemic policy and as an individual, Williams was deeply pathologized from the start of her life. But to rehearse the accumulation of injury would ultimately strip Williams of her humanity. Read does not equivocate on the issue of responsibility: ‘White Australia failed her in every way’—in every intervention, therapy, drug, note to file, gesture, turn of phrase, turn of gaze (Read 2000: xxiv). The often poetic quality of his writing enables Read to capture these factors in their historical specificity, and with all their continuity and discontinuity, from the present back into the past. One passage serves as an example: Read recreates the visit of Doretta Williams’s caseworker, Mrs. English, to the home in wartime Sydney where Doretta has become pregnant. The house itself is an affluent residence that offers accommodation to soldiers recuperating from service in World War II. Read’s recreation of the interview between the shamed, silent girl and the compromised case worker while the men move around them is understated but eloquent in what it implies, and what was no doubt never said: There is dark bush to the right, a croquet court to the left and a tennis court directly below. . . . The couch grass embankment curves away to a flattish area on the left where a man in a deckchair is smoking and reading the paper. Four young men wearing long whites are playing tennis. Two others, shirtless, lie on the grass waiting their turn. . . . In the long silence the tennis players come noisily up the embankment.

128 Nicholas Brown Soldiers on leave: some in their long whites, some in shorts. They stop chiaking to stare rudely at the weeping Aboriginal girl that everyone likes. Mrs English, the child welfare officer, presents her back to the eyes, waits till they pass. (2009: 141) Read concedes the scene is imaginary but argues that ‘the scenario is rather more probable’ in capturing Doretta’s experience than the court’s procedural fi nding in 1999 that she ‘made application as the parent of the plaintiff child [Williams] to admit such child as to the control of the [Aborigines Welfare] Board’ (2009: xxxiii). This ordering of Tripping Over Feathers shifts the emphasis from the mode of testimony as recounting a cumulative ‘fate’ to an understanding of Williams as a figure within deep historical processes. It is a strategy also adopted by Alexander Masters in Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005), which similarly worked back through the life of a homeless man, avoiding easy formulas of cause-andeffect. Transformation here might be deeply compromised: Willams’s ‘avenues,’ Read writes, were ‘closed for her one by one throughout her life’ (2009: xxiii). But it is also accommodated within the distinction Attwood draws between questioning the practices through which historical knowledge is ‘acquired’ for critical use and those that trust in the ‘transmission’ of past experience into a domain of ready identification (2008: 86). Although a highly regarded historian—and like Peel, with great influence in ‘public conversation’—Read had difficulty fi nding a publisher for Tripping Over Feathers. It was not an ‘academic’ text; it did not address an obvious readership; it was unlikely to fi nd its way onto reading lists; his methodology, much more than Somerville’s, would pull a student into dangerous waters in most areas of academic assessment. Clearly, Read has moved further than Peel and Somerville in a form of writing that engaged with the pressures and opportunities of democratization, with the biographical turn, and with the incorporation of voices, gestures and sensibility into text. But the book can be seen to stand at the end of a process of questioning, and innovation, that arises from that unfolding ‘global revolution in historiography.’ If in an Australian context, and reflecting Australian themes, it reflects the risks an historian was prepared to take in responding to the challenges arising from that revolution, and as such prompts reflection on what is at stake in the discipline as it either embraces or disowns the choices Read has made.

DIFFERENT JOURNEYS As noted at the start, my intention here has not been to ‘rank’ these three texts but to consider what they have to offer in engaging new forms of historical and biographically informed writing with current issues in research method and ethics. Each of these books has a context, an intention and a reception that suggest the range of factors currently shaping these issues,

Using Lives 129 from a political agenda defined by ‘anxiety,’ to an environmental agenda that needs to reflect more historically on the ways in which it appropriates places and sensibilities from history, to a reconciliation agenda that can seem abstracted from the trauma and historical questioning at its core. Peel, Somerville and Read write openly about the paths they have chosen in their work and what they have learned through taking them. As I have watched each of them present their journeys in postgraduate workshops, I have been struck by how often their approaches have brought a ‘pennydropping’ expression to the faces of even those working in very different areas—not necessarily because they agreed with the path, but because they could appreciate the issues and the innovation. Hopefully, this survey of their work might have a similar effect.

NOTES 1. The figures include the ‘Battlers and Hansonites,’ drawn from the adopted rhetoric of John Howard’s Liberal Party and the brief rise of right-wing populism in Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and ‘Global North Shore People,’ referring to the upper-middle-class suburbs of Sydney.

REFERENCES Attwood, B. 2008. ‘In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance” and Public History.’ Public Culture 20 (1): 75–95. Berlant, L. 1999. ‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.’ In Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics and the Law, edited by A. Sarat and T. R. Kearns, 49–93. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bonyhady, T., and T. Griffiths, eds. 2002. Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Brown, W. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cameron, J., and K. Gibson. 2005. ‘Representing Marginalisation: Finding New Avenues for Economic and Social Intervention.’ Governance 11 (2): 25–32. Carter, P. 2010. Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2001. ‘Reconciliation and Its Historiography: Some Preliminary Thoughts.’ UTS Review 7: 3–12. Chamberlayne, P., J. Bornat and T. Wengraf. 2000. The Turn to Biographical Methods in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge. Donaldson, I. 2006. ‘Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography.’ Australian Book Review 285: 23–29. Ferres, K. 2005. ‘Habits of Inclusion.’ Griffith Review 8: 110–12. Gelder, K. 2000. ‘The Imaginary Eco-(Pre-)Historian: Peter Read’s Belonging as a Postcolonial “Symptom.”’ Australian Humanities Review, September 2000. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2000/ gelder.html (accessed 21 May 2010). Goodall, H. 2008. ‘Can Environmental History Save the World?’ History Australia 5 (1): 10–12.

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Goodley, D., et al. 2004. Researching Life Stories: Method, Theory and Analyses in a Biographical Age. London: Routledge. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). 1997. Bringing Them Home. Sydney: HREOC. Joyce, P. 1995. ‘The End of Social History?’ Social History 20 (1): 73–91. Mackey, H. 1993. Reinventing Australia: The Mind and Mood of Australia in the 1990s. Angus and Robertson: Sydney. Marston, G. 2008. ‘Technocrats or Intellectuals: Reflections on the Role of Housing Researchers as Social Scientists.’ Housing, Theory and Society 25 (3): 177–90. Masters, A. 2005. Stuart: A Life Backwards. London: HarperCollins. Murphy, J. 2000. Imaging the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia. Annandale: University of New South Wales Press. Peck, J. 1996. ‘The Mediated Talking Cure: Therapeutic Framing of Autobiography in TV Talk Shows.’ In Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Janice Peck, 134–55. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peel, M. 2003. The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Pusey, M. 2003. The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rajan, S. R. 1997. ‘Three Issues for Environmental Historians.’ Environment and History 3 (3): 146–48. Read, P. 2000. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. . 2009. Tripping Over Feathers: Scenes in the Life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Robin, L. 2007. How A Continent Created A Nation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Saunders, P. 2003. The Ends and Means of Welfare: Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Sinclair, P. 2001. The Murray: A River and Its People. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Somerville, M. 1999. Body/Landscape Journals. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. . 2004. Wildfl owering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. . 2007. ‘Postmodern Emergence.’ International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 20 (2): 225–43. Somerville, M., and T. Perkins. 2010. Singing the Coast. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Steedman, C. 1986. Landscape of a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Weir, J. 2009. Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Whitlock, G. 2001. ‘In the Second Person: Narrative Transactions in Stolen Generations’ Testimony.’ Biography 24 (1): 197–214. . 2007. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

8

Integrity and Oral History Choices Facing the Oral Historian Angela Franks

Oral history presents history at its most diverse because it is the past as witnessed by the widest possible range of people and communities. For the most part, it is of personal significance only and is of little interest to the serious student. However, when a society undergoes profound changes caused by war, natural disaster and political or industrial upheaval, oral history can enhance the study of these events—whether from an economic, social or political angle—and provide vivid illustrations of the consequences as experienced by individuals. This chapter will examine the issues facing the oral historian and the integrity of the choices and compromises made when the personal evidence of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events was selected, recorded and presented for two oral history projects. The language of oral history is direct and engaging, so mindful of the tone of the narratives, what follows aims to be a straightforward account of these projects from inspiration to realization. The two books under discussion are Nottinghamshire Miners Tales (Franks 2001) and Nottinghamshire Wartime Tales (Franks 2005) because I oversaw both from concept to publication and was aware of the choices that had to be considered at every stage. Both books, which were published in Nottinghamshire by a local publisher, Reflections of a Bygone Age, were aimed at a general readership including keen local historians or those with a special interest in the subject matter and oral history content. They were a major departure from the publisher’s usual format and had to be accurate, informative and accessible. The fi rst tasks were easily defi nable and will be familiar to those who have taken part in community oral history projects: choosing the subject, selecting the contributors/narrators and recording and transcription of the narratives. In some projects when these early stages are fi nished the team involved sees its task as complete, and the tapes and transcripts become archive material. If publication is planned, then a smaller or entirely different team will edit the material and make decisions on how best to use it. I had to oversee the whole process, which was slow and time consuming, while remaining vigilant regarding issues such as relevance, cohesion and honesty. I was motivated in this task by a belief that the experiences of the common man and woman, as revealed in oral history, can enhance an understanding of the past so that the well-documented actions of those in

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power are counterbalanced by the fi rsthand evidence of those whose lives were affected. So completing each process had to be undertaken with integrity. The venture is best examined under the following headings: • • • •

Choice of subject The researcher/oral historian The contributors/narrators and the narratives The treatment of the resulting body of work

CHOICE OF SUBJECT I had successfully used oral history in the classroom during the 1970s and 1980s and returned to it when researching background material for the books I completed in the Yesterday’s Nottinghamshire series. These books consist of old picture postcards featuring local scenes from the last century accompanied by informative captions written by different authors. It was the third postcard book I wrote, titled Nottinghamshire Collieries— number thirty-nine in the series—that provided a real challenge because I had to satisfy a knowledgeable readership. The Nottinghamshire coalfield had a long history, and there were still many local families who, less than a generation before, had been closely involved in coal mining. In 2000, fifteen years after a bitter strike, all trace of mining was rapidly disappearing from the county, and it became clear that the old postcards provided a unique record of the industry. Even after I had visited old mining villages and read text books, I realized the real solution was to talk to miners who could be of real help with their inside knowledge of the various pits. By sheer good luck I was introduced to Brian and Graham who had worked in the industry from the 1950s to the 1980s. They immediately cleared up some puzzles. For instance, the postcards appeared to show three different mines in Mansfield when in fact there was only one, which had an official name and also local names. This saved me from an embarrassing mistake. They also had far more stories about the everyday life of mining communities than I could include in a picture postcard book. This was the inspiration behind Nottinghamshire Miners’ Tales, and my publisher agreed it was a story worth telling. By the time it was published in 2001, I became aware that a number of important World War II anniversaries were approaching, but the generation who had witnessed it all was rapidly disappearing, so Wartime Tales was conceived.

THE RESEARCHER/ORAL HISTORIAN Having identified two significant periods in the lives of the people of Nottinghamshire that were relevant to local, national and world events—the mixed fortunes of coal mining during the twentieth century and the effect

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of World War II on the local population—it became important to act promptly. Both were still in living memory and would demonstrate how oral history could humanize existing scholarly analyses. Thus it became an urgent duty to seek out and record verbal testimony before a whole generation had passed away. Having found suitable subjects, the discipline of the researcher had to be applied to put strategies into place that would underpin the projects and ensure they were conducted competently. The accuracy of the factual content of a publication is the responsibility of the researcher, so I had to familiarize myself with the period and events in question. For the miners, background knowledge of mining history, engineering and the technical terms commonly used was required so that contributors were confident their stories were in safe hands. Wartime Tales was a different canvas because, once the story moved on from the home front to the different theatres of war, it was essential to both study accounts of the conflict and also to consult both old and new atlases because national boundaries had changed. For example, in 1939 Iran was known as Persia, and much of what was then eastern Poland had been annexed by the USSR. Even the small sample of former servicemen and women involved had seen action in the North Atlantic, Egypt, Italy, Singapore, Burma, Japan and the Gold Coast. In both books cross-referencing was necessary to ensure the authenticity of some narratives and anecdotes. Accounts such as those about the miners’ use of chewing tobacco and snuff, which provide illustrations for the book, had to be investigated. Informative links were prepared that both placed the narratives in the context of the bigger picture and helped to move the background story forward. Apart from places of interest in the county itself, visits were made to Monte Cassino in Italy, the Public Records Office at Kew, the Imperial War Museum and Manchester Museum of Labour History. The narratives were at the heart of the project, so fi nding honest and reliable narrators was essential because without enough people who would take part, the stories, as I envisaged them, could not be told. It would be impossible to present the story of coal mining in Nottinghamshire from the point of view of those who worked in the industry or to recount what life for local people had been like during World War II. The miners were the fi rst challenge. With most of the pits closed and the miners scattered, I again sought help from Brian and Graham because their knowledge had already been invaluable. They guided my fi rst steps and suggested other contacts. Their personal recommendations were necessary because, even fifteen years on, memories of the year-long 1984/85 strike were still fresh, and miners were wary of outsiders. Those I did meet loved to reminisce and in turn told me of others who could help. Some were retired or had found other employment, and some were still involved in aspects of mining such as Mines Rescue Services. This approach of using personal introductions was also used for Wartime Tales. Some of those who described a wartime childhood were friends who had been born and bred in the county. They and

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others introduced me to veteran service personnel from across the county who had stories to tell. This ensured those who contributed were genuine. The approach was informal, and the relationship between researcher and contributor was built on trust. No one would recommend a person in whom they had no confidence. Similarly, the contributors assumed their narratives would be treated with respect and used only for the agreed purpose. It also kept the group of participants to a manageable size. With reference to the miners, initially it seemed possible that only eighty years of mining history could be covered, but the discovery of 1970s transcripts of oral history in a local library meant that the whole century could be dealt with. The use of this particular resource was acknowledged in the book, although it is regrettable that the identity of the group who completed the research was not stated in the files and so proper recognition of their role in the project could not be given. Independent corroboration was straightforward when dealing with miners because they were, on the whole, a cohesive group; mining memorabilia was on display in each miner’s home. In the case of Wartime Tales, there was still an active oral tradition about the home front among the older generation. However, veteran servicemen had been known to make extravagant claims, so although it was assumed they were trustworthy, it was important not to be naïve. Fortunately, without any prompting, fascinating ephemera was produced. Jan, a Polish gentleman, showed me his official army record—a much-folded sheet of paper that listed his eventful army career in a few lines. Alec had a pennant from the American warship on which he had started his journey home from Japan. He also produced a small, grey, dust-stained card that informed his parents he was being well looked after by the Imperial Japanese Army. (After the war, members of the Imperial Japanese Army were executed for crimes against both prisoners of war and the local indigenous people.) It was also a privilege to see the logbooks of several of the former RAF personnel. Towards the end of the war, Lawrie and three close friends served in the Sixty-sixth Squadron in Northern France. Between 1 April and 11 April 1944, his logbook records: ‘Lost Dickie and Jock on 1st. Hit again. Hit again. Lost Huggie on last op. fl ight’ (Franks 2005: 85). The narrators also provided many of the photographs printed in the book. Such evidence both reaches out across the years and also confi rmed the integrity of the contributors. It was my responsibility to handle these items with care and return them promptly. During the planning stages, careful consideration was given to the practical guidelines along which meetings with contributors should proceed. A major aim of oral history is to preserve the individual voice; thus, in order to protect the integrity of the genre and having been told that the project would focus on a specific aspect of the past, narrators had to be given every opportunity to freely relate their experiences. Within these guidelines, the recording sessions were open ended, so to refer to them as interviews is

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misleading. Researchers who conduct interviews and seek to control the content of the narratives by consulting a detailed list of prepared questions will reveal more about their preconceptions than about the narrators’ experiences. There is also a real danger that what emerges becomes too formulaic, and those unique experiences that are at the heart of oral history go unrecorded. Although, for instance, contributors may have served in a similar capacity during World War II, aspects of their reminiscences will be quite individual, as illustrated by the following example. Joan, a former Land Girl, described how tough life was and how they were often hungry. In 1943, when she was based at Lord Rosebury’s estate near Leighton Buzzard, a man working on a nearby farm told a group of the girls that he had the key to an old shed and would show them something amazing if they promised to keep it a secret: When the door was unlocked we were almost blinded by the sight. It was almost dusk and in the failing light, surrounded by the dirty old shed, stood the Coronation Coach. Of course we all took turns to sit in it. (Franks 2005: 51) Given the opportunity to speak freely, individual accounts substantiated each other, which was reassuring, but each also revealed memorable incidents. Before embarking on the recording stage of the venture, it was necessary to reflect on the fragile nature of oral history, which seeks to record that which is dependent on fallible human memory. Narrators were revisiting disturbing experiences that had stayed in their minds. These eyewitness accounts, the essence of oral history, would be flawed yet revealing; they allow the listener or reader to engage with the past and all its uncertainties, unlike hindsight, which judges the past from the perspective of the present. During my preparations I had also been reminded that different personalities coped in different ways with war, famine or imprisonment, and some were so traumatized that they did not speak of their suffering for many years. For instance, Alec was in the Sherwood Foresters during World War II. He was taken prisoner in Singapore by the Japanese, worked on the bridge over the River Kwai and was then used as slave labour in Northern Japan, but it was twenty years before he told his wife and family details of what had happened. It became clear that, although it would be easy enough to gather amusing stories and even some that told of danger and hardship, certain types of experience went deep and were difficult to speak of even years later. Anyone who researches oral history must bear this in mind. One old soldier was urged by friends to take part. He had never spoken of his experiences at Dunkirk and was still affected by them. He kindly loaned me old photographs that were included in the book, but I tactfully reminded his friends that I did not wish anyone to contribute and then regret it. He needed the help of a skilled counselor, not an oral historian. I still wonder

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about the elderly German lady who telephoned. It became clear that she was still traumatized by what had happened to her in Berlin at the end of the war when a gang of Russian soldiers raped her. I was aware of similar incidents, but that was my fi rst encounter with the victim of such an atrocity. We spoke at length on the telephone and I became troubled, not just by her story, but about whether it was appropriate to include her experiences in the book I was planning. Was it ethical to take advantage of her when she might later be upset about speaking to me? In such a small sample, how could I protect her identity? How might her family react? At the end of our conversation I suggested that she talk it over with a close friend or relative before proceeding. Had she contacted me again, I would have sought advice from my publisher; at that point, I wished I were part of a team with which an approach to such problems could be resolved and defined for future reference. I never heard from her again and, and in accordance with my policy not to pressure anyone, I let the matter rest. It was also important to safeguard the reputation of oral history, for there were mixed reactions about what I planned to do. Some shared my enthusiasm, some were dismissive, others were hostile and inferred that oral history was intrusive. This highlighted my concerns about relevance and strengthened my opinion that focusing on a particular aspect or period avoided idle talk. One contributor wanted to tell me the names of all those in his village who, although raised in local families, were the children of American servicemen with whom their mothers had had a relationship during the war. His offer was declined. The role of the oral historian was emerging as a multifaceted one, informed and professional on the one hand, yet sympathetic and approachable on the other. The vital core of the projects was the integrity of all participants, without which the material would lack authenticity.

THE CONTRIBUTORS/NARRATORS AND THE NARRATIVES The fi rst meeting was approached with a mixture of good manners and common sense, plus the awareness that I was working with people of different ages and backgrounds who were giving their time freely and entrusting me with their memories. They could also withdraw their support if they lost confidence in me or in the project. From previous experience with oral history I had learned that the sample that presents itself is not entirely predictable or perfect. I had to work with those narrators who came forward because this was true to real life. An oral historian cannot create characters to fill in the gaps and answer all the questions. However, I take the view that as long as there is corroborative evidence, the narrative of a close relative on behalf of a recently deceased person is valid. For instance, Jean M. told both her own story of life in the Auxiliary Territorial Services and also the experiences of her husband, Kajik, who had escaped from Poland

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and served as a pilot in World War II. Some other narratives in Wartime Tales were a mixture of the spoken and written word. On the other hand, in Miners’ Tales only one narrator, Carl, offered a written contribution, which consisted of poems that he allowed me to publish. My awareness that my source materials were people rather than documents made me realize how valuable they were and how important it was to create a relaxed atmosphere so they would speak freely. The presence of other family members was welcomed because they also had something to add or provided useful prompts. It was also necessary to reassure them, especially when the contributor was elderly, that I was genuine and not out to exploit a vulnerable relative. Travel to their homes was involved, thus equipment had to be portable and unobtrusive. As evidence of my integrity, I brought along the other local history books in which I had been involved. To avoid future misunderstandings, I explained once again that I intended to record the narrative, make notes and use their experiences in a publication; the narrative would be edited but the integrity of their story would be protected. Assurance was given that anything which on reflection they wished to leave out would be omitted. An important consideration was how they wished to be referred to in the text. As a general rule, apart from names, little other private information was included because this could result in some unwelcome invasion of privacy. Some librarians prefer that contributors in their archives be referred to only as file numbers, but it could be argued that, exceptional cases apart, such anonymity compromises the integrity of oral history, the essence of which is a sense of a personal encounter with each narrator. A chat beforehand about the topics to be covered helped the interviewee focus and avoid too much that was irrelevant or repetitive. If guidance was requested, then a chronological approach in the form of a simple timeline was suggested, as well as some bullet points where appropriate. During the recording, interruptions were kept to a minimum and clarification was obtained at the end. I had a couple questions that I asked several of them: ‘What are your memories of the day on which war was declared?’ and ‘What was the worst moment for you?’ The guidelines about the conduct of meetings, which had been established earlier, ensured that the narrators had a positive experience even when talking about sad memories. A flexible approach was needed because there were surprises, and not every meeting resulted in a simple recording that could be easily transcribed. When I went to visit Jan, a veteran Polish soldier, I expected to hear about his experiences at Monte Cassino. We met on a Sunday morning at the Polish Club, but certain difficulties soon became clear. The room had a terrible echo, so recording was very difficult. Jan’s English was poor and he spoke in a deep voice with a broad accent. He had a long story that he was determined to tell, and Monte Cassino was nearer the end rather than the beginning. I arranged another meeting at his home and talked to him a number of times. It became evident that my equipment was not

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capable of recording Jan’s voice clearly enough for it be transcribed, but his story was too important to ignore. Jan’s experiences, and those of thousands of his fellow countrymen, were of epic proportions and the stuff of which oral history is made, featuring long journeys, reversals of fortune and stubborn endurance. It was of relevance to Nottinghamshire because the wartime kindness shown by local people to Polish airmen and soldiers had been much appreciated by General Sikorski, leader of the Poles in exile, and after the war, many Poles had settled in the county. It also related to the bigger picture as it illustrated the human cost of the decisions made at the centre of power. Jan represented not only the Polish community but also the many other displaced Europeans who had sought refuge in Nottinghamshire after the war. In light of its importance and the difficulties of the conventional route, choices had to be made about how best to capture his narrative. In the end, Jan’s story was written freehand during a number of conversations. He was helped by his Polish wife, Barbara, whose English was more fluent. Jan spoke slowly so a companion and I were able to take down his story and capture enough of his actual words to use some lengthy and vivid quotations. We frequently checked with him that we had an accurate version of both his experiences and the words he had used to describe them. Thus we arrived at the best method to capture this particular story and to use with integrity the same mixture of accurate quotations and summaries as employed for other narratives. Miners’ Tales also revealed a particular dilemma that unless resolved would compromise the integrity of the fi nal work: how best to objectively convey the differing experiences and opinions of those caught up in the 1984/85 strike that, although only part of the story, was of enormous significance in recent local history. In the context of this chapter, consideration of this particular topic also illustrates that from time to time choices had to be made, in which the needs of one aspect of my role took precedence over another. Had the material I recorded been intended as an archive it could have been useful, although not telling the entire story, because an archive can be added to at a later date. However, I was under an obligation to meet a publishing deadline and to present as honest and complete a picture as possible that could not be altered once in print. Thus, alongside the oral history element, there was a book to be considered that, although it set out to cover a century of mining history, would be labeled as incomplete and probably fail commercially unless the strike were dealt with fairly. The narratives that had already been recorded reflected the balance of opinion in Nottinghamshire where the overwhelming majority of miners believed that the best way to save their livelihood was to continue to work rather than strike. But although those who had chosen to strike were very much in the minority, the group who had supported the year-long dispute through to the bitter end—and suffered great hardship—had come

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to be regarded in some quarters as folk heroes. In the existing narratives the working miners described violence on the picket lines. The miners involved in the strike refuted much of this but claimed that the police had intimidated them. Then my publisher produced a postcard that he wanted me to use that featured miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and Ian Macgregor, chairman of the National Coal Board, which meant that I had to include some information on the political aspects of the strike. It became a question of balance. Central government had been criticized and local government had been affected by the dispute. A complex mix of political, social and economic history had to be dealt with in a few pages. This was a typical situation for an oral historian because it was not possible to meet everyone who had a legitimate point of view. For instance, I had succeeded in talking to only one miner who had been on strike. Furthermore, making only a brief reference to the strike would not convey its local significance and would have an effect on the integrity of the book. So there was tension between the differing strands involved in my role as an oral historian and as a writer who had been commissioned to produce a book. Giving as complete a picture as possible from a variety of sources was chosen as the best way. Brief quotations from two books were used that reflected the views of the striking miners: Miners’ Strike 1984: Politics and Policing in the Coal Fields by Jim Coulter, Susan Miller and Martin Walker and Hearts and Minds by Joan Witham, which is an account of the work and personal experiences of the Nottinghamshire Women’s Support Group, composed of the wives of striking miners, that extended across the county. Both books were out of print. Neither book was available on general loan and both had to be specially reserved by my local library. Background links that outlined the start of the strike were given, followed by the opposing positions taken by prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. The police were heavily criticized, but even fifteen years later, it was inadvisable for them to speak publicly, although an official response was made at the time. The strike also caused confl ict at the local government level because miners from both sides were members of the county council. Chairman Sir Dennis Pettit agreed to a meeting and suggested that I consult Local Statesmen by Peter Housden. Then there were the experiences of the Mines Rescue Team. Oral history narratives usually describe experiences rather than opinions. When talking about their early days in the industry, the miners were confident and full of anecdotes of both amusing and more serious events. There was a sense that they had derived a great deal of pride from doing an important job. This was especially true of the 1950s and 1960s when pay and conditions improved as a result of nationalization. Within the mining community, people felt secure and confident. However, the mood changed during the 1970s and 1980s because pressure built up both from inside and outside the mining community. The tone of the narratives became reflective as the strike and the resulting divisions were recalled when instead of a

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sense of comradeship it became miner against miner. One commented that they had all been losers in the end. Those working in mine safety and maintenance had always been allowed to go through the pickets to inspect the mine, otherwise irreversible damage would occur, but the atmosphere of distrust and suspicion with which they were met in the 1970s turned nasty in the 1980s. These men suffered both verbal abuse and physical threats as they tried to go about their job. Until this point in the story Norman, who worked in the mines rescue team, and his wife, Jean, were enjoying their memories but became visibly distressed when describing the experience of being called ‘scabs’ by their workmates, who were also their neighbours, and being described as the ‘scum of the Earth’ by outsiders. Stan, who worked at Cotgrave, remembered how intimidating it was to be confronted by hostile pickets: ‘There was one old guy come through the picket lines at Cotgrave and they literally smashed his car to bits’ (Franks 2001: 75). Carl, who worked at Hucknall, conveyed a sense of bewilderment when describing the scenes near the pit: We were going down to work in the morning and you’d get people like being assaulted and things, just unbelievable you know. And cars were damaged and things, just crazy things ‘cos it were miner against miner. You’d see the Metropolitan Police which you knew were London. . . . And I thought what’s happening? Why have these been drafted in? They took a harder line than our police because our police had said to the unions ‘We’ve got to live with these people when it’s all over.’ (Franks 2001: 70) Most of the Nottinghamshire miners continued to work because they believed striking was the wrong course of action. They considered it undemocratic when they were refused a ballot and were also convinced they were being bullied. The striking miners felt betrayed and frustrated because they and their families were making enormous personal sacrifices to save an industry and way of life. Towards the end, they were desperately short of money, and the winter was very hard for them: ‘But the worst was the cold. . . . We burnt furniture. . . . We burnt shoes. We chopped up our wooden ladder’ (Franks 2001: 73). Geoff, who went on strike, did picket duty at Newstead: ‘I thought that the miners who were against the strike were short sighted and had been got at by the Conservatives. I didn’t like Scargill. He was too abrasive but I sensed the truth of what he was saying’ (Franks 2001: 68). Geoff also commented that the accusations of violence made against the striking miners were media manipulation. Then there was the role of the local police, many of whom were from mining families. I only achieved a brief telephone conversation with a police officer who gave his point of view. It is important to remember that both groups in the strike experienced threats and intimidation, and it was the

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responsibility of the police to safeguard the rights of either side to go about their business unmolested. However, even after twenty-five years, much of the bitterness persists. Former miners who went on strike will not work alongside those miners who had continued to work, and fathers, sons and brothers still do not speak. The problem of presenting a balanced picture and preserving the integrity of the resulting work was complex and required ingenuity and compromise. The use of a variety of resources, including oral evidence, allowed all opinions to be expressed and was consistent with my aims and my responsibility as an oral historian to present a summary of the situation in a detached manner. Other interviews were very moving, and I questioned my own integrity in even starting the project. Was I justified in delving into a past that for some of the characters in both Wartime Tales and Miners’ Tales was so painful? Eric was in tears as he recounted being torpedoed twice, on consecutive nights, in the North Atlantic. After the first attack, the survivors were picked up by the Canadian ship Ottawa, but they were attacked again at 11 p.m. on the night of 13 September 1942. After a time there were just six of them left in the lifeboat, singing and saying prayers, until at 4:20 in the morning: Out of the darkness came a big beam. A British ship called The Celandine. It put searchlights on us. One of the six in the boat was Jack Davis who lived in Macclesfield. He was just nineteen. It was his fi rst trip to sea. We were mates. There was a big swell so The Celandine had to put down scrambling nets onto which the survivors had to jump. You only had one chance. I said ‘Come on Jack we’ll be alright now.’ I was the first one. . . . And I scrambled up and two sailors lifted me up one under each arm and took me to the Petty Officers’ mess room and laid me on a table. Coming out of the darkness, being in the darkness all that while, as soon as the light hit me I passed out. Came round and they wrapped me in blankets. One sailor handed me a cup of tea and another a fag. I enquired about Jack. He wasn’t there. He’d missed the net. Nineteen he was.’ (Franks 2005: 57) Alec described the treatment he had received while a POW in Burma and Japan. After working on the bridge over the River Kwai, he was transferred to Katrie near Sendai in Northern Japan: We had icicles from our eyelids and out of our nostrils. But if you let the coal go too soon the women used to thump you with the shovel. . . . Sometimes you were blown off the planks as you walked up. . . . That meant another good hiding for you. (Franks 2005: 90) At times, these and other interviews became difficult even to listen to, but when asked if they wished to stop, the narrators proved they were made

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of sterner stuff and were determined to continue so that they could bear witness to the thousands who had perished. Eric explained that after being rescued, things improved for him and he spent the rest of the war in the US. In spite of all he had suffered, Alec’s proud boast was that he had circumnavigated the world. During the recording sessions, I had chosen the role of listener and enabler rather than judge or interrogator. Thus, when views about past events and personalities were expressed that I did not agree with, I did not comment. Oral history occasionally includes a blending of fact and fiction. I came across one example of this when one narrator made claims that further research proved to be untrue. Because this narrator was sound in all other respects, I did not challenge the account but simply omitted this evidence at the editing stage, which saved that person embarrassment, retained the integrity of the narration and preserved a good working relationship. One thing I do regret is that because of lack of resources, I did not give each contributor a tape of his or her narrative although each was presented with the completed book. The transcripts were the next part of the process and of great importance because, along with the recorded narratives, they were needed as reliable archives that I could use with confidence while preparing the next stage. I chose to use the services of an experienced audio typist to ensure accuracy, and I checked the transcripts for omissions alongside the original tapes. Because I was involved in all of the recording sessions, I was able to fi ll in where words or place names were hard to decipher. During the months it took to record the narratives, I had formed a close working relationship with the narrators. This relationship, combined with my background research, influenced my decisions when determining how best to edit, present and do justice to the contributors and the subject matter of each book.

THE TREATMENT OF THE RESULTING BODY OF WORK During the editing process, my role became similar to that of the ghostwriter. The task was not to correct every mistake but to convey the tone of the original voice while conserving the main elements of the story. An impression of how they spoke was needed rather than their every word. It was not possible to publish any transcript in full, so careful choices and subtle adjustments had to be made, especially when quoting from the narratives. What was acceptable for the listener could be an irritant for the reader. If a speaker made frequent use of a linguistic tic such as ‘er, um’ or ‘d’you see?’ I would include it once or twice but not enough for it to be distracting. To convey a strong accent, simply using a turn of phrase or word from a local dialect was quite sufficient. When dealing with a foreign accent, the use of verbs can be revealing enough. Jan’s encounter with an

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irate Russian farmer is a good example: ‘You Polish buggers. You steal the pig’ (Franks 2005: 62). People did not speak in complete sentences or even grammatically. Both Miners’ Tales and Wartime Tales included those who rarely included a pronoun and several with a staccato delivery. For example, a transcript might read like this: ‘Dad arrived. Comes in. Sits down. Says . . . ’ Many Londoners say ‘you was, we was, they was,’ so leaving this in was faithful to their manner of speaking and did not interfere with the content of the narrative. The transcripts included basic punctuation, but it was necessary to reexamined the relevant passages to ensure the meaning was clear and style was appropriate. It was painstaking work, but without it, the authenticity of the individual voice would have been lost. At this stage, the body of work became a manuscript because it was being prepared for publication with its own set of rules. It was important that each book was complete in itself, so I took note of any terms used that the general reader would need clarified. Sid’s mention of predecimal coinage in his reaction to his fi rst pay packet is a good example: ‘The next week I got six shifts in—twelve shillings and sixpence. I was the biggest bloody man that this town has ever known’ (Franks 2001: 7). With his shilling pocket money, he had bought a two-pence packet of cigarettes yet still had ten pence left. There were also references to old weights and measures. I dealt with this by putting a table for both at the beginning of the book and gave an idea of the value of money by quoting the current price of a packet of cigarettes. It was during these processes that the importance of setting clear guidelines became apparent. In Miners’ Tales I was able to cover one hundred years of mining because of work completed by a local group in the 1970s. It was moving to discover memories that went back to the end of World War I. Mr. Instone was born in 1898: I remember when we had the Spanish flu. They were dying like flies and they used to let us come out of the pit at three-quarter time. There were six of us, all of a size. Strong as young bulls. If the body was less than a mile from the church you weren’t allowed to have a hearse and they had to carry them to the church. We used to bury them by lamplight. (Franks 2001: 16) I was pleased to have found these transcripts, but the project had not focused on a defi ned area of study. The results were disorganized and rambling, and it was not surprising that only the most persistent researcher would fi nd them useful. All the work and effort involved would have been so much more rewarding if subsequent uses had been considered during the planning stages and if the archive had been recognized as a fi rst step rather than an end in itself. If the work produced is not coherent enough to be used by scholars or creative writers, then the power of those experiences to illuminate the past will be lost.

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Working on all aspects of the books virtually unaided was challenging, but as a result, I had a good knowledge of all the narratives. My publisher kept a tight rein on book length, but I had a free hand for the rest. There were certain things I decided straight away. For instance, in Wartime Tales all of the contributors were young at the outbreak of war, so I showed only photographs of them as they were at the time of the conflict. In order to retain the integrity of its Nottinghamshire title, only those anecdotes about the home front relating to the county itself were included, but some of the accounts of life in the armed forces were from those who had taken up residence in the county at a later date. This broadened the appeal of the book. With the miners, I wanted to convey a sense of their home life, hobbies and how they coped with the hours of working underground. When I found out about snuff taking, which I thought was extinct, and the use of flavoured chewing tobacco, I visited the Pit Stop Shop in the mining village of Clipstone and through them was able to contact the suppliers, McChrystal’s, who kindly sent me advertising material from the 1950s and 1960s, which added authenticity to the book. Much leisure time was associated with the mine through colliery bands, football teams and galas, which built up a strong sense of community similar to the sense of common purpose present in Wartime Tales. With the target audience in mind, I chose a format that I can best describe as a piece of theatre in which, as the drama unfolded in the background, various minor characters stepped into the limelight and told their story. Some appeared only once or for a brief moment, but others came and went as the story progressed. This allowed readers to identify with narrators and gave a sense of continuity, which was especially evident in Wartime Tales. Both the groups conveyed a certain nostalgia, not the oversentimental kind for which local history is often criticized, but more a regret at the loss of their youthful vigour and optimism. Clear themes, relevant to both local and national coal fields, emerged in Miners’ Tales, which described the early days when boys led pit ponies and miners worked with a pick and shovel through to mechanization and nationalization and an increasing emphasis on safety, rescue and welfare. But some things barely changed so that being taken on at the pit remained the same from the 1920s and 1930s to the 1970s and depended on having a family member working in mining. The fi nal years were dealt with by referring to the Nottinghamshire Coalfield Enquiry, set up in 1999, which outlined the measures being put in place to deal with the economic and social effects of pit closures. However, the miners had the final say as they pondered on the fate of coal mining in Nottinghamshire. Wartime Tales gave a vivid picture not only of a county but also a country at war. The children’s viewpoint was revealing, for while adults grappled with the realities of life on the home front, children reveled in interrupted school days, swapping detritus from bombs and identifying the sound of ‘their’ or ‘our’ airplanes. As the service personnel moved

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to different theatres of war, the enormous scope of the conflict became apparent. Each book delivered on the original promise and told the story mainly through oral history as well as containing sufficient information to guide uninformed readers through the complexities of World War II or the consequences of the collapse of the mining industry. The narratives illuminated the past and demonstrated the effects of the decisions made by those at the centre of power on the lives of ordinary men and women.

REFERENCES Coulter, J., S. Miller and M. Walker. 1984. Politics and Policing in the Coal Fields 1984. N.p.: Canary Press. Franks, A. 2000. Nottinghamshire Collieries. Keyworth: Reflections of a Bygone Age. . 2001. Nottinghamshire Miner’s Tales. Keyworth: Reflections of a Bygone Age. . 2005. Nottinghamshire Wartime Tales. Keyworth: Reflections of a Bygone Age. Housden, P. 2000. Local Statesmen. Warwick University: Local Government Centre Nottingham. Witham, J. 1986. Hearts and Minds. N.p.: Canary Press.

9

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ Heloise and Abelard, Old Bones and the Uses of the Past Juanita Feros Ruys

Who owns the people of the past? Who owns their stories? Does our inheritance of their textual legacy imply a contract of good faith, an obligation of stewardship? Is it legitimate to use a real life as the basis for a fictionalized text? If so, how do we balance the demands of historical authenticity with the free play of imaginative re-creation? In this chapter I would like to explore these questions with regard to the medieval couple Heloise and Abelard and the staged productions that their tale of love and loss have inspired. We can perhaps mark the fount of these fictionalizations as Alexander Pope’s 1717 poem Eloisa to Abelard, written in the form of a letter from Heloise to Abelard, but as I have discussed elsewhere the trajectories and rationales of the fictionalizations of Heloise that burgeoned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the wake of Pope’s poem (Ruys 2010), I will concentrate here on twentieth-century plays and film.

ALEXANDRE LENOIR AND OLD BONES Let me begin, however, with the cautionary tale of Alexandre Lenoir. As a young man and a novice painter at the time of the French Revolution, Lenoir was disturbed by the reformist zeal that was motivating the ransacking and destruction of many of the religious monuments of medieval and early modern French culture. He became involved in the effort to preserve this French history, and from a position as guardian of salvaged remains at the former convent of the Petits-Augustins in 1791, he became curator of the new Musée des Monuments Français when it was formally established in 1795. This museum was devoted to monumental materials not considered of sufficient universal, enduring or aesthetic value to qualify them for inclusion in the museum of the Louvre, the collection of which was also under development at this time. This meant Lenoir’s domain largely consisted

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 147 of materials of religious and royal provenance such as statuary, including funerary statuary, tombs and epitaphs and stained glass windows. It was in this capacity that he came to take charge of the bodily remains of Heloise and Abelard. These had been removed from the convent of the Paraclete, of which Heloise had once been abbess, just prior to its dissolution and destruction in 1792. From there they were transferred to and reburied at a church at Nogent-sur-Seine, but as Charlotte Charrier writes, they were coveted by Lenoir, who desired to bring them to Paris and include them in his ‘Elysian’ garden necropolis that housed the tombs of French greats such as Descartes, Molière and La Fontaine (Charrier 1977: 330–31). Indeed, Andrew McClellan suggests that ‘in the late 1790s he [Lenoir] collected actual bodily remains almost as zealously as he did celebrated monuments’ (1994: 179). Lenoir fi nally gained possession of the remains in 1800, at which time they were exhumed from Nogent and underwent cataloguing. The official document of this process (‘Proces-Verbal de l’exhumation d’Abélard et d’Héloïse à l’église de Nogent,’ 23 April 1800) reveals that the single casket holding the two bodies was divided into two parts, one housing the remains of Abelard and the other, Heloise. Of Abelard, the remains were noted as portions of the thigh and shin bones, several ribs, much of the skull and the lower jaw; of Heloise, it was observed that her skull was preserved almost entire, that her lower jaw was in two parts and that, in addition, leg and arm bones remained in their entirety (Charrier 1977: 591–92). A problem was brewing, however, and it arose from Lenoir’s singular nature. ‘Over time,’ argues McClellan, ‘Lenoir came to identify with his collection,’ treating it with ‘a fierce possessiveness common to collectors and museum curators.’ McClellan concludes: ‘His dedication verged on obsession’ (1994: 159). This obsession and sense of ownership focused on, among other objects, the bones of Heloise and Abelard. As well as having them measured, Lenoir had moulds made of the two skulls so busts of them could be fashioned. Soon, moved by his ‘great, generous, and impulsive heart,’ as Charrier says, Lenoir began to keep for himself fragments of the remains and to disperse them to close friends, his superiors in the curatorial world and important dignitaries as gifts and tokens of esteem. This was not the fi rst time the remains had been plundered, as one of Heloise’s toes and a number of her teeth (which were reportedly of ‘an extraordinary whiteness’) had already been requisitioned in or prior to 1792, and one of the teeth was set in a ring (Charrier 1977: 317n4). Of Lenoir’s more wholesale dispersal, Charrier writes that although we might wish to doubt it, the textual evidence for it is overwhelming, including correspondence from the grateful recipients of his unusual largesse. This dispersal continued for the duration of the period the bones were under Lenoir’s stewardship—that is, for thirty years, until 1831 (1977: 339–41).

148 Juanita Feros Ruys TELLING ANOTHER’S STORY Why begin with this morbid account? It can offer a salutary comparison with the work of historical fiction. Writers of fictional works that seek to reanimate real, once-living figures of history must consider their role as stewards of the entirety of the literary/textual remains of those figures. Consequently, they must resist the temptation, such as was apparently felt by Lenoir, to keep pieces of the story for themselves or to give tokens of them as gifts to others or to extract fragments from the whole and fashion them into pretty pieces of jewelry. When we fictionalize or dramatize the story of Abelard and Heloise and we throw away Abelard’s letter on the history of the nuns, we ignore the forty-two questions and answers on scriptural exegesis that were exchanged between them; and we overlook the hundred and more hymns written by Abelard at Heloise’s request, and we extract the single line ‘O God cruel to me in everything’ from one of Heloise’s letters or the moment of coupling in the convent refectory from one of Abelard’s; and we polish up these fragments and use them to set off a story of unbridled medieval atheism and lust, is this not simply a textual version of the pillaging of Heloise’s teeth? What we end up with might well be one genuine part of the entire skeletal frame, but removed from its corporeal wholeness, can it ever be more than a fetishized object that lacks integrity in both its literal and figurative senses? Stories are not bones, of course, but both are the artefacts of a human life lived in the past, and for that reason, both should be treated with respect by those in the present who wish to study, view or use them. As Maria Margaronis asks, ‘What are the moral implications of taking someone else’s experience, especially the experience of suffering and pain, and giving it the gloss of form?’ (2008: 138). This question becomes particularly pertinent when applied to medievalist cinema in which ‘gloss of form’ becomes the overriding consideration. John Aberth has argued of medievalist cinema, for instance that: Rather than trying to educate us as to what really happened, the main goal of cinema is to entertain. It cannot hope, and does not aspire, to achieve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of historical works. Except for some experimental, avant-garde fi lms, a creative narrative cannot allow alternative points of view, cite sources, or utilize a critical methodology. If screenwriters and directors attempted to be ruthlessly historical, their products undoubtedly would be commercial, not to mention artistic, failures. (Aberth 2003: viii) If we look to cinema to do no more than entertain, if a film offers as its purpose nothing more than commercial success, what if anything, will be its commitment to integrity in representation of medieval persons? Should the lives (not to mention the sufferings) of once-living humans be exploited as commercial entertainment any more than we would now accept the display

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 149 of ‘exotic’ humans or human artefacts as conversation pieces? Eventually, the tide turned against Lenoir with the sense that his Musée des Monuments was ‘exploiting the remains of the dead’ (McClellan 1994: 196). Is it now also time to reconsider the role of historical fiction in this regard? Of medievalist historical fiction, the fi rst question we might ask is: do we have, in general, a right to tell someone else’s story? In answer I adduce the medieval concept of memoria, which Heloise and Abelard themselves actively employed in their writings. At its most literal, memoria simply means ‘memory,’ but in the Latin-literate scholastic practice of the Middle Ages, it meant a great deal more than that; it signified an intellectual and emotional inhabiting of someone else’s experience in order to understand and clarify one’s own life and thereby make and enact decisions. Most important, it was an ethical practice and was considered important in the creation of an ethical subject (Carruthers 1990: 178–82). Where a medieval life is being used to think through current issues in a way that is respectful of its medieval specificity, then we can perhaps contend that memoria allows us to move ahead with our fictionalization. In a way, this is the obverse side of the coin to my previous argument on the role of memoria in legitimizing the application of a critical imagination to historical study, especially where documentary evidence is lacking (Ruys 2004). It brings us to a fountainhead where creativity is imbued with critical praxis (or vice versa), which may allow us to answer in the affi rmative the question posed by Margaronis: ‘Can imaginative language discover truths about the past that are unavailable to more discursive writing?’ (2008: 138). The question remains, however, whether extant texts automatically offer themselves as invitations to reimagining. Roberta Frank has written of medieval writers enduring ‘much loneliness, toil and suffering’ in creating their texts, ‘gambling on immortality and not always winning’ (1994: 205), but does a textual legacy by its mere existence constitute itself as a source for fictionalizers? Perhaps we could argue that subjects who offer the world a text, especially one about themselves, thereby accept some consequences in terms of public profile and the use of such a profi le by others. But not every medieval text we have is in fact a gamble for immortality. What should we do if it isn’t? In this case, Abelard made his story public. He wrote an open letter, ostensibly a letter of consolation to a fellow monk, which is now known as the Historia calamitatum (Story of my misfortunes) and which contains most of what we know about his life story, including his relationship with Heloise. He then circulated it for his own purposes (probably seeking official approval to leave his unsuccessful abbacy at St. Gildas in Brittany and return to teaching in Paris). Heloise read a copy of this and responded, initiating their now-famous correspondence. At this point we could argue that Abelard had rendered his life an open book, thereby constituting it as fair game for future fictionalizers, and in fact, we know that his story attracted such attention even in his own time (Dronke 1976). However,

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Heloise’s letters to Abelard, which contain her striking claims of a desperate lack of vocation for the monastic life and a continuing sexual desire for Abelard—both of which constitute the delight (if not the mainstay) of fictionalizers—were not, and most likely never were intended to be, made public. We do not know exactly where they were for the fi rst hundred years of their existence until they appeared in the hands of the poet Jean de Meun in the late thirteenth century, but most likely they formed part of the institutional record of the convent of the Paraclete of which Heloise was abbess. In other words, they were private documents, not intended to be seen by anyone other than the original correspondents and perhaps a select later audience of monastic readers at the Paraclete. If Heloise specifically did not make her thoughts public, what are the ethics of using these letters in imaginative recreations of her life story? I think their use can be justified on three grounds. First, as Heloise rather forcefully points out in her Ep. II, Abelard did not accurately represent her words, her actions or her motives in his Historia: ‘You kept silent about most of my arguments for preferring love to wedlock and freedom to chains’ (Radice 2003: 51). Fictionalizations that take account of Heloise’s somewhat different memories of their shared history can then be considered a justifiable dialogic corrective (if not, indeed, a necessary one) to Abelard’s monologic account. Second, in her letters, Heloise takes up a position of the hypocrite—though perhaps as much rhetorically as ingenuously (Brown 1996; Findley 2005)—lamenting in her Ep. IV that the world now knows her only as a chaste and pious abbess and is not aware of her ongoing struggle with her sexual memories, which she sees as constituting a significant part of her monastic persona: ‘Men call me chaste; they do not know the hypocrite I am. . . . I can win praise in the eyes of men but deserve none before God’ (Radice 2003: 69). In this regard, fictionalizations that acknowledge this part of her self can be seen as ethical in that they offer Heloise an expression that she felt was lacking in her own lifetime (Ruys 2008). Third, Heloise recalls in her Ep. II the love songs that Abelard wrote about her in the time of their courtship that circulated through the Paris streets, remembering that ‘as most of these songs told of our love, they soon made me widely known,’ and that ‘your many songs put your Heloise on everyone’s lips so that every street and house resounded with my name’ (Radice 2003: 53, 55). Perhaps this also can be read as evidence that Heloise was not averse to having her story publicly known. If we proceed, then, on the basis that Abelard and Heloise would putatively be happy enough to have their story retold, what next? We need to consider why we want to retell the story, from whose point of view the story will proceed, whether we wish to use the original texts as our source or rely on another’s retelling, and—what turns out to be the key issue with regard to ethical retellings of the Heloise-Abelard story—what genre we wish to employ.

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 151 DRAMATIC AND CINEMATIC LINEARITY A problem with telling a two-person story in any generic form that employs a linear narrative—and this encompasses most novels and fi lm, especially those aiming for a mainstream and mass-market audience—is that generally only one point of view can be presented by that means. As Robert A. Rosenstone has written of such historical fi lms, each ‘compresses the past to a closed world by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation. Such a narrative strategy obviously denies historical alternatives, does away with the complexities of motivation or causation, and banishes all subtlety from the world of history’ (2009: 31). This is not, of course, a given of fi lms, but a choice in the way most linear-narrative fi lms designed to reach a wider audience are constructed. Natalie Zemon Davis has shown that, in fact: Film has countless possibilities for showing more than one story at once and for indicating in a concise and arresting way the existence of other interpretations’—it is just that most historical films fail in ‘suggesting the possibility that there may be a very different way of reporting what happened, and giving some indication of their own truth status, an indication of where knowledge of the past comes from. (2009: 27–28) Abelard’s Historia stakes an impressive claim to a monolithic truth. Its ostensibly ingenuous style, confessional mode, seemingly self-deprecating admissions of lust and pride and narrative sweep from birth to the very present give it a ring both of authenticity and completeness. It thus provides fictionalizers with an apparently authoritative source for their writing. It can be difficult to remember, then, that there is an alternative point of view, the one enunciated by Heloise in her letters. It is Heloise’s sinuous arguments that elicit from Abelard incidents that he has, for whatever reason, elided in his initial narrative. What of the fact that when Heloise escaped from Fulbert’s house to ride to Brittany while pregnant, she wore a nun’s habit as disguise? Or that when she had fi rst been lodged by Abelard at the convent of Argenteuil after their secret marriage, he came to visit her and they had sex in the convent refectory? These are fairly key moments of their shared history, and scenes that add a buzz to many a fictionalization, but we must remember that we know of them only because Heloise insistently pressed Abelard on his version of the truth. That these incidents are not mentioned in the Historia should give a writer pause when considering its accuracy and comprehensiveness. A fictionalization that proceeds with integrity will be aware of these competing discourses between the two historical protagonists and will at least attempt to take them into account, even if full representation of multiple points of view is not possible. A good example of what happens

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when this consideration is not heeded is provided by the film Stealing Heaven (1988). Despite its claimed indebtedness to Marion Meade’s novel of the same name, which takes some pains to be historically accurate, this film ruthlessly presents Abelard’s point of view. This is most striking in the section of the story following his castration when Abelard decides to become a monk. The film portrays a sincere repentance on his part, a wholehearted turning towards God. We see Abelard single mindedly taking his vows, his thoughts on no earthly matters, while Heloise lingers at the back of the church, unable to believe her lover has abandoned her, uncertain of what she will do next. Yet we know this was not necessarily how it happened because the manner and order of their twin entry into religion so rankled with Heloise that she could still muster a palpable anger over it a decade later in her Ep. II: When you hurried towards God I followed you, indeed, I went fi rst to take the veil—perhaps you were thinking how Lot’s wife turned back when you made me put on the religious habit and take my vows before you gave yourself to God. Your lack of trust in me over this one thing, I confess, overwhelmed me with grief and shame. (Radice 2003: 54) An ethical fictionalization of the story would certainly take into account Heloise’s alternative version of events in presenting the scene. The perniciousness of the one-sided ‘reality’ thus created by film is revealed in Kevin J. Harty’s summary of Stealing Heaven in which he claims that it is ‘told from Heloïse’s point of view’ (1999: 486). On the contrary, Heloise here has been silenced, and this should not be a feature of historical fiction that wishes to tell its story with integrity.

THE SPECTACULAR MIDDLE AGES Perhaps the greatest stumbling block, however, for the ability of dramatic fictionalizations to treat their medieval subjects with integrity and sensitivity are the generic demands of theatre and fi lm for spectacle. John Van Engen acknowledged as much when he characterized late twentieth-century medievalist permutations of the Heloise-Abelard story as ‘nude scenes of love-making and violation on stage and screen,’ the quote I have used in my title (1994: 404). Nudity, sex scenes, bloody simulations of castration and cries of irreligious intransigence—or conversely, dramatic displays of sudden conversion—have become staples of the visual representations of the Heloise-Abelard story. Can such spectacle ever be consonant with an integrity in historical fiction that extends, not only to the medieval figures it represents, but also to the more recent texts that it uses as the basis for its dramatization?

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 153 Helen Waddell was a medievalist scholar and author of the highly acclaimed study of goliardic literature, The Wandering Scholars (1927), when she brought forth her novel Peter Abelard (published in 1933, but begun many years earlier). She had not only read all of Abelard’s known writings in preparation for her earlier study, but she had also pored over the hundreds of volumes of medieval Latin texts in the Patrologia Latina and thus came to the subject of her novel thoroughly imbued in the world of twelfth-century Paris, its schools, personalities and thought (Blackett 1973; Corrigan 1986; Fitzgerald 2005). Her novel combined intense historical research with a free play of imagination in which she reveled; an illustration of this is given in a letter she wrote to her sister Meg in 1932: I’m at the heresy hunt chapter now and enjoying its malice—a great relief from the wild tragedy of the others. But I’ve had to read a lot of Abelard’s theology to get into the heresy business—a difficult one technically. (Blackett 1973: 100) Waddell’s novel was so academically correct that it actually appeared in the bibliographies of biographies of Abelard and Heloise until the 1970s— sometimes not even distinguished as a novel. Waddell opens her novel with Abelard at his desk late at night, attempting to write while distracted by a love lyric sung out in the street. Compare the opening scene of the play Abelard and Heloise by Ronald Millar (1970), which is explicitly based on Waddell’s text. Millar opens his play with a scene not in the novel, Abelard’s donation of the convent of the Paraclete to Heloise in 1131. As a scene designed to express the idea of ‘medieval religiosity,’ it is overdetermined: Monks and nuns sing in the darkness and are then seen kneeling in prayer around a large wooden cross as the lights come up, a symbol indicating the Holy Ghost is illuminated upstage, and—that classic dramatic marker of the medieval Church in play and film—Abelard speaks in Latin. Heloise’s fi rst words then shatter this sense of reverence: I’ve never been very interested in God. These lovely, empty rituals mean less to me than one man’s glance, a single touch of hands. Peter, Peter, who art here beside me, hallowed be thy name, thy will be done on earth—on earth—for what else is there? (Millar 1970: I, i, 2) This clearly offers the audience drama, but possibly at the cost of authenticity and integrity to the internal spiritual world of a complex medieval woman. From the outset, Heloise’s spirituality is discounted and she is established instead (as though the two are binary opposites) as a figure of the erotic. The same tension is enunciated—even exaggerated—in the fi lm Stealing Heaven. This film is based on the novel of the same name by Marion

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Meade, which articulated a 1970s feminist attempt to imagine a learned but sexually responsive Heloise who genuinely struggled with the actions of God in her life. Meade’s novel opens with Heloise on her deathbed. Although she is not overly pious, she clearly accepts God’s will in all things: ‘What lessons did thou mean to teach me and why did I, who greedily absorbed all human wisdom, learn so late to discern thine?’ she asks (Meade 1979: 11). By contrast, the opening scene of the fi lm, like that of Millar’s play, emphasizes the clichés of medieval religiosity. Nuns walk in candlelit procession and then kneel before an altar as a faux-medieval chant plays over the scene. Indeed, William F. Woods has noted that many medievalist films open with a sense of movement—a journey or a procession—precisely as a marker of the ‘medieval’ (Woods 2004: 42). Heloise is on her deathbed and calls for a crucifi x, but only in order to withdraw from the base a love token that Abelard had once given her and that she had hidden there decades earlier. With the last of her strength, she hurls the crucifi x against the wall where it smashes. The nuns cross themselves in horror, and the gentle soundtrack jars into discordant tones. Again the sexualized Heloise trumps the spiritual one. It certainly makes for a dramatic opening scene, even if it departs from anything approaching historical reality. Of course, whereas anachronistic medieval atheism (paganism? hedonism?) makes for good spectacle, by the same token, so does a dramatic last-minute conversion. We know Heloise spent more than four decades of her life as a nun. During this time, as her letters reveal, she certainly struggled with the path God had chosen for her, but she was through the course of her life surely a Christian: she neither expressed atheistic sentiments and died unrepentant nor underwent a sudden conversion. This is not, however, a situation that plays constructed on a linear timeline fi nd satisfactory. They require a narrative arc, character development and spectacle, and so they work to resolve the issue, clarifying Heloise’s position as either saved or damned. As it turns out, saving Heloise can prove almost as dramatically satisfying as having her remain defiantly atheistic. In the plays by James Forsythe and Ronald Millar, Heloise’s conversion comes as the climax of an intense dialogue where she and Abelard argue over the nature of love, both human and divine, and of her sacrifice for him. Through piety and intellect, Abelard convinces Heloise of the possibility of loving God by loving him. Heloise then makes a dramatic gesture of conversion. In Forsythe’s play, ‘unable to control her emotion further,’ she ‘falls on her knees in an attitude of prayer’ (1956: III, iii, 190); in Millar’s play, she ‘stretches out her arms and lifts her head, her body forming the shape of a cross’ (1970: II, xiii, 66). And with these striking postures of female submission to logic, man, church and God, the curtain falls. The requirement of spectacle and narrative closure in these plays limits their ability to represent in Heloise a realistically ambiguous and complex spirituality, as opposed to a contrived and melodramatic one.

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 155 In order to gain maximum dramatic value from a fi nal conversion scene, these playwrights must earlier construct an excessively impious or even blasphemous Heloise. Further, in depicting Heloise as converted by Abelard, they enact the fantasy expressed in Abelard’s own letters that his words will turn Heloise towards God. Finally, by rendering Heloise’s conversion an unproblematic turn from carnality to spirituality, they invoke the discourse of the fallen woman (the Mary Magdalene figure) and theorize woman as oscillation between the permanently separate poles of sexuality and spirituality. It does not, in this regard, actually matter in a narrative dramatic production whether Heloise is saved or damned—just so long as the act itself is unambiguous, there is a sense of dramatic closure and the scene is made spectacular for the audience.

‘NUDE SCENES OF LOVE-MAKING AND VIOLATION’ More disturbing in terms of integrity in representation, however, is the fact that the ‘nude scenes of love-making and violation’ evoked by Van Engen offer theatre audiences more than just titillation and spectacle; they also enact and reify a conservative gender ideology. The lovemaking scene in Millar’s play offers a predatory and carnal reading of femininity. Heloise enters the stage crying: ‘Hold me—hold me, Peter—closer—closer still.’ The stage directions depict her fi rst ‘slowly sinking to her knees’ before Abelard then ‘sinking to lie back on the floor’ with the cry, ‘Love me. Love me.’ Meanwhile, Abelard remains superior in his amusement at Heloise’s carnality: ‘He looks down at her, strokes her hair, chuckles’ (Millar 1970: I, xiii, 33). Yet he can still take charge when the moment of lovemaking arrives, being both emotionally detached and sexually virile. The fi lm Stealing Heaven enacts a similar duality. Heloise initiates the physical contact by demanding and taking a kiss from Abelard (the female seductress), but Abelard then asserts his dominance by taking her hand, leading her upstairs, lifting her onto the bed, removing her clothes and making love to her, throughout all of which she remains curiously passive, silent and pliable. By contrast, the opera libretto by Peter Tahourdin (1993) reverses these gender depictions. Tahourdin’s Heloise conforms more to a Victorian ideal of womanhood, fearful of lovemaking and mindful of the religious proscriptions against it: ‘Do not tempt me, Peter. We must be careful. Take care—take care! You know that. This is holy ground, and we may be seen.’ Abelard by contrast is domineering, forceful and driven by lust: ‘(fi rmly) No beloved! We are safe here. Quite safe. Do not draw back from me. I cannot bear it. I love you. I need you. I need you now! (He kisses her passionately)’ (1993: 20). In the lovemaking, Heloise is entirely passive, Abelard the predator; in fact, Tahourdin describes the scene in just such terms: ‘He supports himself with his hands upon the table, spread either side

156 Juanita Feros Ruys of Heloise; he presents a somewhat sinister image, not unlike a bird of prey.’ When Abelard disrobes Heloise, he covers her with his gaze: ‘She is naked, her back against the table. He looks at her, then slowly, but deliberately, pushes her backwards’ (20). In doing so, he doubles the spectacle of the naked Heloise, foreshadowing and directing in his own gaze the wider gaze of the audience. The stage enactment of Abelard’s castration is also played for maximum spectacle. In Millar’s play a scene is made of the nude body of the punished Abelard: ‘The five Students enter carrying Abelard, naked except for a length of linen cloth. They lay him in the bed’ (1970: II, ix, 53). Abelard’s castration is then reenacted for the gaze of the audience by the students’ vengeance of a similar crime perpetrated upon Guibert, the servant who had betrayed Abelard to Fulbert’s wrath: The fi rst two Students seize Guibert’s arms, and the middle Student his feet. . . . All lift Guibert in the air, the middle Student kneeling up and opening Guibert’s legs wide. A spotlight comes up on Guibert. The two Students facing upstage draw knives, hold them out on either side on straight arms. Guibert screams. The Students slowly bring the knives down in an arching movement over Guibert’s crotch. On his bed, Abelard writhes in agony. (II, ix, 54) Although the scene is not played nude in the fi lm Stealing Heaven, there is little doubt about the act performed: Abelard’s arms and legs are held splayed, and a man with a curved knife stands between his legs and slashes the knife downwards. There is a close-up of Abelard’s face as he screams. Tahourdin’s libretto is even more explicit: As the lights come up, Abelard lies naked on the table, immobile, his arms stretched out along the planks. The Storyteller enters. . . . He moves quickly over to the table, then stands, with his back to the audience, over Abelard’s body. He raises a knife high above his head . . . then brings it down swiftly. Abelard gives a single, prolonged scream. The Storyteller exits hurriedly, leaving Abelard still in the same position, but with a blood-red stain covering his genitals. (Tahourdin 1993: 20–21) What ideology do these competing and, importantly, consecutive spectacles of nude lovemaking and castration enact? Presenting a male and female actor nude on stage states and renders visible the ideological position that there are two irreducible and mutually exclusive sexes (Butler 1990, 1993; Laqueur 1990). With the binarism of sex thus established, the scenes of lovemaking proceed to the binarism and alignment of gender, producing the identities ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ that are made to fit naturally and without overlap onto the bodies (continually being) sexed ‘female’ and ‘male.’ The spectacle of the sexed body (with

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 157 its overtones of titillation and taboo) effectively overrides any questioning of its own display: for the audience, a reality other than two naturally sexed and gendered bodies that it sees before it becomes unthinkable. The scenes of lovemaking then enact (and in enacting reproduce and render natural) the existence of heterosexual desire in which issues of sex and gender are necessarily implicated, both as cause and effect. Judith Butler argues that ‘“intelligible” genders are those which institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire’ (1990: 17). Clearly, the nude scenes of lovemaking in the staged productions of the Heloise-Abelard story are implicated in the construction of such ‘intelligible genders.’ There are also conceptual and ideological links between the nude scenes of lovemaking and those of castration, or between gender and punishment. When the punishment that is publicly enacted on Abelard is one of genital mutilation—that is, when the punishment would appear to attack the sexgender matrix itself and remove the ‘facticity’ of sex (in Butler’s terms) from the performance of gender—how does this cause the juxtaposed scenes of nude lovemaking and castration to be read? We might assume that the reification and ideological alignment of sex and gender enacted by the scenes of lovemaking would be immediately thereafter contested by the scenes of castration, but I would argue that this is not the case. Rather, the performance of Abelard’s castration is wholly consonant with the ideological impact of the scenes of lovemaking, in that it constitutes a daring attempt to reify the male sex and masculine gender as disembodied forces, which are universal and indestructible. What exactly is it that has been effaced by the castration? The immediate answer might be Abelard’s status as a body, which is sexed male, but this does not appear to be the case. Abelard is still chromosomally male and is treated as such by the other characters. In Millar’s play, immediately following the castration, Gilles de Vannes refers several times to Abelard as a ‘man’ despite Abelard’s bitter arguments to the contrary. When Abelard says: ‘I’m nobody’s ‘man’, as you so delicately put it,’ Gilles replies: ‘Your body’s mutilated, not your mind’ (Miller 1970: II, x, 55). This clearly resituates manhood from the body, and specifically the genitals, to a more abstract space. Later in Millar’s play, Heloise explicitly refers to Abelard as ‘my man’ (II, xiii, 63). In the film Stealing Heaven, when Heloise fi rst visits Abelard in his room following his castration he rejects her assistance, declaring: ‘I’m an abomination.’ She responds: ‘You’re a man.’ Later she reconstitutes the binary of sex by asserting: ‘I’m your woman!’ By the same token, Abelard is never represented as less masculine than before his castration, or as somehow feminized. He retains the clothing of a masculine body and behaves in a way culturally designated as masculine: he argues philosophy, teaches his students, says Mass, and prays in Latin. Nor is the existence and practice of a heterosexual orientation called into question by the castration. Heloise is clearly represented as retaining an

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unchanged heterosexual desire for Abelard, despite his genital mutilation. In Millar’s play Heloise, many years a nun, cries out: ‘Warm sweet body in my arms . . . I want you now. I need you now’ (Millar 1970: II, xiii, 63). In the fi lm Stealing Heaven, when Heloise fi rst sees Abelard following the castration, she calls him ‘my lord, my love,’ and soon afterwards declares: ‘You’re a man. And I love you.’ In Tahourdin’s libretto the nun Heloise sings: ‘I lie in my bed and you are there with me’ (Tahourdin 1993: 24). Millar even makes a gesture (largely unconvincing, given the discourse of authenticity on this point) towards Abelard’s continued heterosexual longings (Radice 2003: 87), having Abelard respond to Heloise’s complaint about her uncontained desires by answering in an aside: ‘She thinks because the body fails, desire fails with it. If only it were true’ (Millar 1970: II, xiii, 62). If none of sex, gender, heterosexuality or desire is effaced by Abelard’s castration, then what is the dramatic and ideological connection between gender and punishment? In part, the answer is that Abelard is punished not for his heterosexual desire but for his unregulated and unruly pursuit of it to the detriment of masculine cultural constructs, such as the laws of hospitality, the responsibility of a teacher to his students and the proper observance of holy days and places (lovemaking is enacted on Good Friday in Millar’s play, on Christmas Eve in the film Stealing Heaven, and at the convent of Argenteuil in Tahourdin’s libretto). His penalty is not to lose his sex, his gender or his desire but to have his desire regulated and redirected towards God. This connection between lovemaking, violation of cultural laws and punishment is most strikingly expressed by Tahourdin in his opera libretto wherein Abelard’s castration follows immediately upon the scene of his forceful sexual enjoyment of a naked and passive Heloise at Argenteuil. There is only a brief blackout between the scenes during which the prone naked body of Heloise is replaced by the bound naked body of Abelard (Tahourdin 1993: 20). Bonnie Wheeler has argued that one rhetorical intention of the historical correspondence between Abelard and Heloise is to ‘project an Abelard so irreducibly male that even castration does not imperil his gender’ (2000: 108; Irvine 2000). In the same way, modern staged productions of the Heloise-Abelard story reify masculine gender. As spectacle, the nude scenes of lovemaking align sexed bodies with their traditional genders and produce an indisputable essentialism; the identity of a person is reduced to the ‘truth’ revealed by his or her genitals, and the nature of this truth is binary: there can be only male and female. The nude castration scenes, however, which follow soon afterwards, free the masculine gender from the necessity of the male body. As a result, the masculine gender becomes a free-floating entity, disembodied and universalized, a voice unbounded by flesh. The feminine gender, however, undergoes no such act of liberation and remains explicitly tied to the female sexed body, as represented by Heloise’s continual references to the unattenuated lusts of her body for

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 159 Abelard. Audiences thus bear witness to the essentializing of the female/ feminine and, conversely, the universalizing of the male/masculine. The existence of the sex-gender binary is thus reinforced at the same time as its poles are differentially valorized. This is precisely the power and gender differential adduced by Kathleen Biddick when she questions the value of ‘making women visible’ as a tool for feminist medieval studies. As Biddick warns, this may not always be a liberating move (1998). EPISTOLARY DRAMA: A WAY FORWARD? It therefore appears that linear-narrative, spectacle-driven forms of drama may not constitute the ideal vehicle for telling the Heloise-Abelard story with integrity. What then of a nonnarrative, nonlinear approach to the story? If the spectacles of sex, sacrifice and salvation, which seem to be necessary in any linear retelling of the story, could be removed, would it be possible to approach it with greater integrity? Would, for instance, a read exchange of their letters that gives equal voice to both Heloise and Abelard solve the issue of multiple viewpoints and alternative realities? Certainly epistolary plays appear more accommodating of their distinct speaking voices. Each speech can approach self-containment, existing in a less rigidly structured relationship with the speeches read before or after it than is possible with lines of dialogue that must, by convention and for sense, interact with each other. Within nonnarrative plays, Heloise’s spirituality can be treated with greater nuance and subtlety. In Ronald Duncan’s play, Abelard & Heloise: A Correspondence for the Stage in Two Acts (1961), Heloise does not blaspheme against or deny the existence of God, yet it is clear that to her, God is a pale shadow before the bright light of her memory of Abelard. She argues that Abelard’s conception of God is not her own, for her God, she says, would desire the devotion of a whole person, whereas she can only be whole by retaining her love for Abelard: Would you have me believe in a God Who wants you to worship Him with your hands but not your feet, who wants your prayers, but not your passion? (I, 46)

Nor does Duncan require of Heloise a defi nitive act of conversion. She reads aloud a letter to Abelard telling him that she has sublimated her passion for him in love for God, but Duncan adds these stage directions: ‘She drops her pen. Her hand reaches out towards him, belying her words, showing she does not feel any of the sentiments in her letter. It is a conscious sacrifice, a gift of love to him’ (II, 76). Abelard writes a fi nal letter in response praising her decision, but again actions gainsay words: ‘He thumps the desk with his fist and then his hand reaches out to her as her hand still

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reaches towards him. A blackout, except for spots on the two hands’ (II, 80). The matter, even for Abelard, is clearly far from resolved, the situation left deliberately ambiguous. Duncan’s focus is on the human emotions that must come into play in order to contemplate and execute a decision to love God beyond all others, and he explores this through words, not spectacle. The only spectacle in the entire play is the closing one of the hands straining unsuccessfully to reach each other. Thus it is not one of completed act—the dramatic closure of a definitive conversion or damnation—but of ongoing process—a reaching for understanding. The duet Heloise and Abelard (1973), with music by Thomas Pasatieri and lyrics by Louis Phillips, similarly elides the question of Heloise’s eventual spiritual status. Heloise and Abelard seek God in their own love. For example, Abelard sings: ‘I will be a mouth to pray with,’ and Heloise replies: ‘If God is love, then let Him see how I love you’ (1973: 15–16). After his castration, Abelard demands that Heloise turn from him to the church, and she searches without resolution for an understanding of his words. However, Abelard’s own struggle with his decision is revealed in the baritone line through repeated phrases such as ‘I will not think of you’ and ‘no more’ sung beneath Heloise’s more dramatic soprano line: ‘Now let me weep, that all my tears may drown the fi re within me’ (23). The lyrics attributed to Heloise and Abelard end at this point with the spiritual status of both singers unresolved. The song then concludes with the baritone and soprano lines representing an epitaph on the tombs of the lovers that refers to ‘their shared repentance’ but focuses more on their eternal connectedness: ‘And now in eternity, we hope they are happily united’ (26–27). A moment of conversion, of some sort and at some time, is thus suggested, but is not made the subject of dramatic spectacle. In theory, then, nonnarrative, epistolary staged performances might offer a more respectful way of approaching the Heloise-Abelard story— but there are still caveats to be heeded. For instance, one defi ning factor could be the texts used for the letters presented in the play. In his foreword, Duncan advises that he read two English translations of the Latin letters in preparation for writing his play. He notes that one of these was of the fictional correspondence between Abelard and Heloise that circulated from the early eighteenth century into the twentieth century and was tremendously popular, whereas the other was a literal early twentiethcentury translation of the authentic correspondence made directly from Latin by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. Duncan disliked the ‘real’ translation and argued of the fictional correspondence: It is a pity that we have not more such literary forgeries. For whoever made this version was a master of English prose. I know of no better prose than that which the forger produced in the second and fourth Letters from Heloise to Abelard. By comparison Mr. Montcrieff’s [sic] translation from the original Latin is turgid and stiff, the style one of scholarship, and almost as unreadable. (1961: 12)

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 161 When Duncan tells us then of the letters presented in his play that ‘I have kept fairly closely to the Latin; but for the most part, I have been content to be faithful to the essence of the correspondence and have not hesitated to invent material to support it’ (1961: 11), should we be wary? The fictional correspondence was enormously influential on literary representations of Heloise and Abelard, inspiring Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, for instance, which was in its turn productive of waves of poetic imitations in both English and French. The problem was the Heloise of these texts became debased into a lovelorn and abandoned victim who bewailed her fate while enclosed in a single cell, weeping hysterically and obsessively over Abelard’s letters to her (Ruys 2010; Cizewski 1987; Feilla 2003, 2004). The brilliant, successful abbess who was admired by all her contemporaries in the monastic world (Radice 2003: 36) was forgotten. In fact, the fictional correspondence proved seductive to those wishing to engage in imaginative reconstructions of the Heloise-Abelard story precisely because it offered them the romantic hero and heroine they desired, a couple who talked passionately about love while practising valiant self-denial, rather than the somewhat odd medieval couple of the authentic correspondence whose arguments can seem to the modern sensibility cold, rhetorical and lost in the alterity of medieval monasticism. Duncan may claim he has respected the authentic correspondence, but echoes of the fictional correspondence appear throughout his play. In fact, the powerful moment of Heloise’s self-renunciation that constitutes one of the play’s climaxes (the other being Abelard’s matching gesture) comes directly from the fictional correspondence. Thus when Duncan claims that ‘in the subterfuge of Heloise’s last letter—I have put dramatic needs above any other consideration’ (1961: 11), he is admitting a conscious choice to value the fictional Heloise, with all her flaws, inaccuracies and conservative readings of female learning and sexuality, above the words, sentiments and actions of the real woman. Such a choice, Duncan has assured us, is consonant with artistic integrity, but what of its historical integrity? Does it matter if an historical woman has been silenced or misrepresented, if by it we gain a moment of theater magic?

WHOSE WORDS? Integrity in the choice of the authentic correspondence as a basis for dramatization is one consideration; integrity in assigning this quoted material to its original author is another. In many of the staged productions we fi nd playwrights including authentic lines of dialogue, but transferring them to a different speaker in a way that can only alter their original meaning and reflects upon the construction of the historical personages involved. Interestingly, this transfer nearly always constitutes a transfer of Heloise’s words to Abelard. This phenomenon occurs in Duncan’s epistolary correspondence. There in his fi rst letter Abelard declares:

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Juanita Feros Ruys Though my body cannot satisfy my desires My mind does nothing but torture me With memories of how you first gave yourself to me. This is my rack, and the robe and habit which I wear is a masquerade. I know this now; God has always known it: Though we can deceive men for a time And ourselves for a long time we cannot deceive Him. (1961: 26–27)

These words are clearly drawn from Heloise’s Ep. IV wherein she makes her famous claims of continuing sexual desire for Abelard and sense of hypocrisy among the men of religion who people her world (Radice 2003: 68–69). Why transfer it to Abelard, when it is so much a part of who Heloise is as a monastic woman? The answer is the requirements of dramatic agency: Duncan cannot write an epistolary correspondence that sustains audience involvement in its passionate tension of erotic and romantic love, both expressed and denied, using Abelard’s original words. The historical Abelard simply did not deal with Heloise that way. Indeed, his task as her monastic superior and the founder of her convent was always to focus her mind on her successes in the monastic world and on the path she must continue to walk. If that meant refusing to become involved in a discussion of loves once lived, so be it—despite the outrage of future readers. As Mark Twain memorably (if not entirely accurately) put it: ‘She poured out her heart in passionate, disjointed sentences; he replied with fi nished essays. . . . She showered upon him the tenderest epithets that love could devise, he addressed her from the North Pole of his frozen heart’ (1902: 122). Performance considerations thus motivate Duncan’s transfer of this sentiment of repressed sexuality from Heloise to Abelard; the question remains, however, whether this does violence to the historical person of Heloise. Similar examples can be found in most of the staged productions of the Heloise-Abelard story. In the film Stealing Heaven, Abelard reads in voiceover a letter he is writing to Heloise. This letter comprises five sentences, of which the fi rst three are inventions of the screenwriter, the fourth is a quote from Abelard’s own Ep. V, and the fi fth is taken from Heloise’s Ep. IV: ‘To me your praise is more dangerous because I welcome it’ (Radice 2003: 70). Not only is this not Abelard’s own line, it is not even in Meade’s novel Stealing Heaven from which the film was adapted. The screenwriter, Chris Bryant, has returned to the authentic correspondence and deliberately imported this line—out of context. Why? Throughout the film Heloise is portrayed as a predatory female, powerful in her intellect, her sexuality and her irreligiousness. Having Abelard voice his vulnerability to her in this way reformulates the balance of power from the historical relationship, in which Abelard was the instigator of their sexual relationship, their marriage and

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 163 their entry into religion, and instead constitutes Heloise as the dominant (and eternally dangerous) member of the partnership. Peter Tahourdin’s opera libretto Heloise and Abelard has the couple sing a creed of their faith in duet, then Abelard speaks the line: ‘Let us not now aspire to be more than Christians’ (1993: 28). This line, however, comes from Heloise’s Ep. VI wherein she discourses at some length on what might constitute the proper form of monastic life for women (Radice 2003: 98; Posa 2008). Transferring it to Abelard plays into the conservative gender dichotomy that Abelard (the male) is the proper repository of all sentiments that are rational or theological, whereas Heloise (the female) can only be identified with carnality and, most particularly, sexuality. Giving this line to Abelard also continues the dramatic tradition of representing Heloise as essentially irreligious. In Didier Bezace’s 1987 play, Héloïse et Abélard, jours tranquilles en Champagne, there is a single actor onstage—the character of Abelard— and the voice of Heloise is heard occasionally from offstage, interrupting his soliloquy. The character of Abelard relates his story more or less as it is presented in the Historia, but when he arrives at the moment of the marriage argument, there is a departure. In the Historia, Abelard describes how, when he demanded marriage from Heloise on the basis that he had promised her uncle and guardian that he would so restore the family honour, Heloise responded by presenting him with an impressive array of philosophical and theological arguments against the state of marriage, particularly for philosophers and teachers. Yet in Bezace’s play, instead of attributing these famous misogamist arguments to Heloise, the character of Abelard begins to pronounce them as though they were his own. Suddenly the voice of Heloise breaks in: Oh non, Pierre, pas le mariage. . . . Le titre d’épouse est jugé plus sacré, plus fort, pourtant celui de maîtresse m’a toujours été plus doux! . . . J’en prends Dieu à témoin: le nom de courtisane avec toi me serait plus doux que celui d’impératrice auprès d’un empereur. (Bezace 1987: 45) [Oh no, Peter, not marriage. . . . The title of wife is judged more sacred, stronger, yet that of mistress will always be sweeter for me! . . . I call God to witness: the name of your whore will be sweeter for me than that of Empress to an Emperor.] These are indeed Heloise’s own words (taken from her Ep. II)—but so are the words that Abelard has just spoken. As a complex and highly intelligent woman, Heloise was capable both of expressing traditional antimatrimonial arguments at one instance and articulating her own personal stance against the bonds of marriage in favour of a sexualized friendship between equals at another. Instead, however, the playwright has performed a dualist split upon her words, attributing those that are deemed logical and philosophical to the male speaker and leaving the more abandoned and intemperate ones

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for the female. This gender dichotomy, perhaps conceived for the benefit of audiences who would not be able to comprehend a woman who could be both learned and passionate, not only does violence to the historical figure of Heloise, but also to gender representations more generally. There are specific explanations for these individual moments of theatrical ventriloquism, but is there an overarching ideology at play? It would appear that although playwrights feel the obligation to include ‘authentic’ speeches in their texts, they do not necessarily feel a corresponding obligation to attach these speeches to their ‘authentic’ speakers. Instead, the speeches become free-floating entities, distributed according to gender and performance imperatives. The words and ideas of the speeches become tied not to a persona but to a gender: It is masculine, not feminine, for example, to espouse moderation in religion; rational discourse on marriage is masculine whereas passionate avowals of whoredom are feminine. In the end, gender and genre imperatives override those of authenticity. This conforms to traditional understandings of gender but at the expense of the more nuanced understanding of medieval people—and especially medieval women—than might otherwise be possible. In these cases, integrity to dramatic structure overrides integrity in dealing with an historical woman.

CONCLUSION If we think of the people of the medieval past as the subjects of our historical and imaginative stewardship, we can begin to approach them and their literary remains in a way that remains respectful to them while still allowing for the function of memoria to be at play upon the texts they have left us. It would appear that the requirements for a narrative arc and dramatic spectacle in linear-time theatre and cinema productions remain fundamentally inimical to the ethical telling of the Heloise-Abelard story, tending to produce an Heloise of one-dimensional, sensationalized carnality and irreligiousness. Moreover, the ‘scenes of nude love-making and violation’ that such productions necessarily entail enact their own conservative ideology that overwhelms the story, rendering it a vehicle for establishing and enforcing contemporary meanings that have little to do with the historical couple. Nonlinear epistolary retellings of the story offer more scope for an ethical way of dramatizing the medieval couple, but attention must still be paid to the source of the letters that are read in such productions and to the attributions of words to speakers. In all, dramatic and cinematic representations of the Heloise-Abelard story remain problematic as a means of representing a medieval couple—and especially a complex medieval woman—with integrity. It may be that further play with generic structures needs to take place before the story of Heloise and Abelard can be presented to a wider theatre or cinema audience in a way that is truly respectful of the integrity of their story and their historical persons.

‘Nude Scenes of Lovemaking and Violation on Stage and Screen’ 165 REFERENCES Aberth, J. 2003. A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film. New York: Routledge. Bezace, D. 1987. ‘Héloïse et Abélard, jours tranquilles en Champagne.’ L’avant scène théâtre 804: 41–52. Biddick, K. 1998. ‘Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible.’ In The Shock of Medievalism, 135–62. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blackett, M. 1973. The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. London: Constable. Brown, C. 1996. ‘Muliebriter: Doing Gender in the Letters of Heloise.’ In Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, edited by J. Chance, 25–51. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. . 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York: Routledge. Carruthers, M. J. 1990. ‘The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture.’ In Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charrier, C. 1977. Héloïse dans l’histoire et dans la legende. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints. Originally published 1933, Paris: H. Champion. Cizewski, W. 1987. ‘From Historia calamitatum to Amours et infortunes: The Legend of Abelard and Heloise in Seventeenth-Century France.’ Studies in Medievalism 3: 71–76. Corrigan, D. F. 1986. Helen Waddell: A Biography. London: Victor Gollancz. Davis, N. Z. 2009. ‘“Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead”: Film and the Challenge of Authenticity.’ In The History on Film Reader, edited by M. Hughes-Warrington, 17–29. London: Routledge. Dronke, P. 1976. Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies. Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press. Duncan, R. 1961. Abelard & Heloise: A Correspondence for the Stage in Two Acts. London: Faber and Faber. Feilla, C. A. 2003. ‘Translating Communities: The Institutional Epilogue to the Letters of Abelard and Heloise.’ Yale Journal of Criticism 16: 363–79. . 2004. ‘From ‘Sainted Maid’ to ‘Wife in all her Grandeur’: Translations of Heloise, 1687–1817.’ Eighteenth-Century Life 28: 1–16. Findley, B. H. 2005. ‘Sincere Hypocrisy and the Authorial Persona in the Letters of Heloise.’ Romance Notes 45: 281–92. Fitzgerald, J. 2005. ‘Helen Waddell (1889–1965): The Scholar-Poet.’ In Women Medievalists and the Academy, edited by J. Chance, 323–38, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Forsythe, J. 1956. Héloïse. In Three Plays: The Other Heart, Héloïse and Adelaise. London: Heinemann. Frank, R. 1994. ‘On the Field.’ In The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, edited by J. Van Engen, 204–16. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Harty, K. J. 1999. The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films about Medieval Europe. Jefferson, NC: London: McFarland. Irvine, M. 2000. ‘Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculinization.’ In Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, edited by J. J. Cohen and B. Wheeler. New York: Garland. Laqueur, T. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Margaronis, M. 2008. ‘The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century.’ History Workshop Journal 65: 138–60. McClellan, A. 1994. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Meade, M. 1979. Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard. New York: William Morrow. Millar, R. 1970. Abelard and Heloise. London: Samuel French. Pasatieri, T., and P. Louis. 1973. Heloise and Abelard for Soprano and Baritone with Piano. Melville, NY: Belwin-Mills. Posa, C. 2008. ‘Neither More than a Christian nor More than a Woman: The Theology and Spirituality of the Body in the Writings of Heloise of the Paraclete.’ Unpublished thesis, Melbourne College of Divinity. Radice, B., trans. 2003. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Revised by Michael T. Clanchy. London: Penguin. Rosenstone, R. A. 2009. ‘History in Images/History in Words.’ In The History on Film Reader, edited by M. Hughes-Warrington, 30–41. London: Routledge. Ruys, J. F. 2004. ‘Playing Alterity: Heloise, Rhetoric, and Memoria.’ In Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, edited by L. D’Arcens and J. F. Ruys. Turnhout: Brepols. . 2008. ‘Heloise, Monastic Temptation, and Memoria: Rethinking Autobiography, Sexual Experience, and Ethics.’ In Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental CulturalHistorical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, edited by A. Classen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. . 2010. ‘From Virile Eloquence to Hysteria: Reading the Latinity of Heloise in the Early Modern Period.’ In Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period, edited by Y. A. Haskell and J. F. Ruys. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS; Turnhout: Brepols. Stealing Heaven. 1988. A New World International presentation, an Amy International / Jadran fi lm, directed by Clive Donner, screenplay by Chris Bryant. Tahourdin, P. 1993. Heloise and Abelard. Sydney: Pellinor. Twain, M. 1902. The Innocents Abroad; Or, the New Pilgrim’s Progress. London: Chatto and Windus. Originally published by H. H. Bancroft, 1869. Van Engen, J. 1994. ‘An Afterword on Medieval Studies, Or the Future of Abelard and Heloise.’ In The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, edited by J. Van Engen. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Wheeler, B. 2000. ‘Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession.’ In Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, edited by J. J. Cohen and B. Wheeler. New York: Garland. Woods, W. F. 2004. ‘Authenticating Realism in Medieval Film.’ In The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, edited by M. W. Driver and S. Ray. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

10 Integrity at the Intersection Peripheries, Herstories and Film María Reimóndez

An intersection is a place where different ways meet. This chapter develops at the intersection between different disciplines, times and places. Intersections are related to borderlands, crossroads and junctures, in the way Gloria Anzaldúa had described them, ‘that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide’ (1987: 79). I will argue that intersections are also the places where integrity is debated and exercised. No story, no history, no fi lm, no article can be written without an overt or covert explanation of what that place is. That is why when we come to an intersection we have to look around at the paths that cross and at the lines that collide. In this particular case, the roads are many. At the intersection between fact and fiction, we fi nd historical film and literature. They are the place where two discourses collide. How do they intersect? Do they meet and mingle, become one like the waters of springs in a new river? Do they part after they meet? We also have the intersection of those paths with the routes of lesbian history, representation and experience, of gender and historical concepts of sexual identity. We follow the path of how decisions are made in invisible corners in the production of such powerful medium as films, which later, as products, have produced once again a labyrinth of roads related to interpretation, psychoanalysis, representation and power. Intersections, fi nally, are located in places. The place in this case becomes another path, the one leading to Galicia, a stateless nation where definitions of identity are loaded with meaning. All paths meet there, in the coming together of different peripheries, herstories and film, and in the subject who undertakes the task of acting.

TAKING STEPS When one is asked to write the screenplay for a fi lm about two Galician women who married in 1901, no doubt an historical story of the marginalized from several quarters, one faces the question posed by Gayatri C. Spivak (1985) in quite an acute way: Can the historical subaltern speak? And if she can, how? The answer implies inscribing myself in the

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story, keeping in mind the way Amy Villarejo describes engaged intellectual work as ‘linking the self to the process of study, linking one’s political and intellectual investments to the writing work of cultural criticism’ (2003: 9). Those of us working with historical material from a feminist and/or lesbian background have learned to become distrustful of the sources. When one is not an historian but has to work with historical materials that are not produced by feminists, as we shall see in the following example, this problem is one of the key issues at hand. Developing the story of Elisa and Marcela, the two women who were married in A Coruña in 1901, was challenging from this perspective because the only source available to work with was a book written by historian Narciso de Gabriel and there were hardly any other resources available regarding even the time period in which they lived. I will refer to these difficulties later. When the story of Elisa Sánchez Lóriga and Marcela García Ibeas entered my life, I was already acutely aware of the importance of intersections. Both as a translator, writer, scholar and development worker, issues regarding position had been crucial to my understanding of all these activities. My theoretical background in these different fields had helped me understand key issues related to power and how it infuses any activity we may take part in. My relation to film at that time was only superficial. I had attended a seminar with Teresa de Lauretis, I was familiar with Mulvey’s visual pleasure (2000) and as a bisexual woman, I was interested in fi lms by and/ or about lesbians. I had myself directed some short documentaries (one on Galician women’s views of civil war and two about women in development projects in India and Ethiopia), but I had considered them an extension of my other activities, not professional endeavours. Iconic Galician fi lmmaker, producer, poet, musician and writer Antón Reixa contacted me in 2009 to write the screenplay of a feature film based on Elisa and Marcela’s story. When I asked him why he chose me, he said he wanted somebody new to the business, somebody with a particular (feminist) approach, and he thought I could be the one. The fact that he suspected I was a lesbian also had some influence in his decision, he later confessed. My flirting with the historical, however, was not new. A few months after Reixa’s proposal, my novel Pirata was published, a rewriting of Mary/Mark Read’s story in which I already had developed my own sense of interaction with historical facts in fiction. My approach to Elisa and Marcela might be understood as a continuation of my work in Pirata. In both cases I understood my position as filling the gaps and infusing life into characters that were just a sum of facts. I became mistrustful and learned to read between the lines. Both works would articulate the voices of lesbian women. In the case of Mary Read, there were few historical remains and many feminist interpretations of them; and in the case of Elisa and Marcela, the situation was the opposite. Although I had never written a screenplay for a feature film, I was already aware of the subaltern position I was expected

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to adopt. As R. Harwood describes it, ‘the screenwriter must learn, and it is sometimes a painful lesson, that he is not an equal partner, indeed he is somewhat subservient’ (2008: 14). As a translator, I was already used to that position and also to subverting it as much as possible. To start working, I had to access any historical accounts available about the two women. The only source available was a book written by Narciso de Gabriel, an historian who specialized in issues related to education in Galicia. His book traced the story of two women who met at the teachertraining school of A Coruña around 1884 and who were already so passionate about their friendship after a couple years that Marcela’s parents decided to send her to Madrid to complete the course. However, when Marcela came back, she passed her exams to become a teacher and moved to Dumbría, a small village in the province of A Coruña. Elisa, who had been working as a clerk at the teacher-training school, also started working as a teacher in rural Calo and visited Marcela often. After some time, Elisa resigned her position and moved in with Marcela, who continued teaching while Elisa took care of the house. At some point, Elisa became violent, and after one of these very public fights, she supposedly left for the Americas. Marcela mentioned to neighbours that she received letters from a suitor, a cousin of Elisa, and that they were going to be married soon. She went back to A Coruña for the wedding. The suitor, Mario, had told a priest that he had been living in the UK and he had not been christened as a Catholic (a requirement for marriage, as civil marriages were not allowed at that time in Spain). In much haste he was christened, they were married, and they were so happy that they had a picture taken by one of A Coruña’s best photographers. After a few days, they went back to Dumbría. There, the villagers realized that ‘Mario’ was actually Elisa. A mob tried to attack her, but she escaped. Marcela remained in Dumbría and Elisa went back to A Coruña. They were planning to be together again, but the press suddenly started to spread the news that two women had been married. Elisa, questioned by the priest, claimed that she was a hermaphrodite. A medical examination was conducted, but it did not support her claim. After that, they fled to Porto, where they lived happily, Elisa as a man and Marcela as a woman, until they were once again found out. This time, they were incarcerated. The Portuguese authorities only pressed charges on forged documents and false identity. A campaign was started in Porto to set them free, claiming that it was only due to ‘women’s foolishness’ that they had plotted to get married. Elisa and Marcela spread the story that Marcela had a violent suitor and that was the only way out they could envisage. The Galician and Spanish Diaspora led a successful campaign to release them. Some time later, the press reported that Marcela had given birth to a girl. When the press found them next, they had moved to Buenos Aires; Elisa had married a Danish widower, but after the marriage he found out the truth about her and her ‘sister’ and ‘niece.’ There are no further traces after these last events.

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This is a summary of the accounts reported by Narciso de Gabriel. In the introduction to his book, he explains how he came across the story of Elisa and Marcela by chance. He was working at the Historical Archive of Santiago de Compostela in 1993, reading some disciplinary fi les of Galician teachers, when he found one that contained a page from the newspaper La Voz de Galicia of 22 June 1901 titled Asunto ruidoso (Scandalous affair) that mentioned a marriage between two women. He ‘read the chronicle and was amazed’ (2008: 11). After that fi rst moment of awe, he started researching and went to Dumbría, the village where the events took place, but nobody remembered or wanted to say anything about those facts. He came to the conclusion that oral sources were not available and took recourse to written sources, namely, the press and some legal documents. His approach to history is clear when he states that ‘history, apart from describing facts, must try to explain them, or at least understand them’ (2008: 12). Interestingly enough, what he desperately wanted to understand was ‘the reason for such a peculiar marriage’ (2008:12) as if, of course, loving one another could not be a reasonable explanation for such an event. After that he explains how he found ‘the only explicit clue’ (2008: 13) in hermaphroditism and how from there he was led to lesbianism (though one cannot be clear about what he means by the word) and fi nally to feminism as interpretative keys. These three trends are dealt with in separate chapters, not as an approach that he could have given to his research, but as a series of anecdotes presenting how hermaphroditism, lesbianism and feminism were conceived (by mainstream society, i.e., the medical discourse, the press, etc.) in the past. For example, he claims that feminists of Elisa and Marcela’s time, like Galician Emilia Pardo Bazán, were not considered proper women but rather a third sex because they engaged in activities traditionally considered masculine, but he never refers to a feminist framework of analysis (2008: 267). Gabriel acknowledges that members of the gay activist group Milhomes of A Coruña fi rst made this story visible—they created an award named after Elisa and Marcela and have been pushing the municipality of A Coruña for years to name a street after them—but he never refers to their sources. If we understand gay and lesbian subcultures, then it is obvious this is the place to start. People do not usually read the press of a hundred years ago, therefore this might have been a story passed on in the gay and lesbian community of the city. His exclusive focus on the press as the source for almost all information provided only the mainstream image of these two women who, of course, were seen as freaks and deprived of any social context of their own. The only context Gabriel provides has to do with that of schools (his original interest as a historian), teacher training and law at the time the events took place. Gabriel cannot escape what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg refers to as ‘the twentiethcentury tendency to view human love and sexuality within a dichotomized universe of deviance and normality’ (1996: 371). If he had, he would have

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explained the context of these events in terms of the relationships between women at that time and not in isolation. Presenting such facts in isolation can give the same impression as that which the press and the medical discourse did at that time—that these women were freaks who had to be controlled. In fact, we know they were not the only women to get married, although Galician history has been too busy with patriarchal notions of nation even to provide any historical accounts of the situation of women, let alone their relationships at the time. In any case, examples of women’s marriages from other countries in the West, such as those presented by Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull in Britain from 1780 to 1970 and the passions between women described by Emma Donaghue for an even a much earlier time, 1668 to 1801, can become the backdrop against which the study could have taken place (let alone the wide range of literary sources of all different times, which Gabriel only briefly mentions). All these hints already showed the only existing source to be politically unreliable. This means the data gathered in the book lacked a critical approach and had to be handled with care and suspicion. A sound critical approach to the story of Elisa and Marcela is still pending, but for the time being, I had to work with what was available to create the characters and their story and give them a new life in fi lm. I was clear about one thing: the focus of the screenplay had to move away from that freak approach. This means the focus could neither be on finding an explanation to their marriage nor on showing how exceptional their case was, but rather on weaving the context of their relationship and their decisions. My interpretation of their lives as lesbian lives is supported by what Alison Oram and Annemarie Turnbull claim: If women leave evidence that they are conscious of the power of their feelings for and attractions to other women, we can be more confident in our attempts to identify, albeit partially, their lives as lesbian lives. (2001: 2) Therefore, although Elisa and Marcela apparently did not try to make any claims with their actions, and they remained in history only accidentally (they were found out), still, their love story shows they were stubborn and prepared to fight against all obstacles. It is difficult to imagine that two people who were not in love and just wanted more comfortable means by which to live would have chosen that path and not the more common one of marrying a man. Therefore, in my rewriting of Elisa and Marcela, I took into account the difficulties outlined by Oram and Turnbull: [Lesbians] did not necessarily have a language to describe themselves as lovers of women, or to claim any particular identity based on their sexuality. They could only understand their desires, behaviour and experiences within the social context of their own times. (2001: 1)

172 María Reimóndez This does not mean they were deprived of agency. In fact, feminists of their time seemed to share this same view. Gabriel includes an article by Emilia Pardo Bazán in which she contextualizes the marriage of Elisa and Marcela and already clearly identifies the agency and cunningness of at least the cross-dressing: The dexterity and resolution with which she weaved her plot to shed, so to speak, her female personality and legally acquire the male one, reveal an intelligence that is out of the ordinary, and they amaze the novelist who could never manage to think of such a twisted plot . . . to achieve that transmigration from female to male . . . one needs an extraordinary ability, and whoever has achieved it, for whatever purpose, is not an ordinary person. (2008: 307–8)5 For Bazán and for me, it was obvious that Elisa and Marcela had plotted, fooled and used their knowledge to escape from different situations that threatened their love. I did not try to present them as lesbian activists because they were fighting for their individual happiness and did not try to make a political statement, but that is completely different to trying to deprive them of any agency and make them victims of their circumstances. My rewriting was also concerned with stereotyping. In Gabriel’s account, the press had taken much effort to show a typical butch and femme couple, with Elisa thus leading Marcela, the better-off and innocent young woman, astray. However, in light of all the events they shared, one could conclude they had alternated gender roles to suit the expectations of society and their own needs at different times. Theirs was a gender performance. Indeed, the historical data presented could not tell us anything about their actual relationship to one another, but it shed light on the roles they had played for others to see. For example, playing the possessive card was only a way to get Elisa out of Dumbría and out of people’s minds before getting married in A Coruña, a perfectly planned plot. Their shifting roles were, for me, one of the most interesting aspects of constructing the characters, and it implied that they were aware of what society expected them to be. In order to fight stereotyping, I decided to present a gallery of other women—heterosexual, lesbians, friends and foes—who could help contextualize their actions.

WALKING, STUMBLING, GETTING UP, WALKING All these conscious decisions had to be made explicit when new steps were to be taken in a movie production. Until the month of July 2009, it was only Reixa, his production manager for feature fi lms and myself who had been involved in developing the different approaches to and drafts of the story. At the beginning of July 2009 a meeting was arranged with a prospective woman director for the film. The production manager, the director and

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myself were present during what turned out to be a startling discussion about what were precisely the aspects that were key to my reading of Elisa and Marcela’s historical background. The confl ict that took place can only be understood if we think of the historical as being the key aspect for contention. The level of speculation regarding what they could have known, done and advocated for at that time was heavy on the director’s side. Emma Donaghue explains the importance of such assumptions (and she is speaking about the seventeenth century!): The question of knowledge is so important because many historians assume that women at this time were wholly ignorant of lesbian possibilities and therefore did not know how to conceive of themselves as lovers of women. . . . How can they assume that ‘most people’ in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Europe remained ignorant of the existence of sexual passion between women when there were songs, court cases, pornographic pictures, medical and literary books and endlessly retold anecdotes about the very subject? (1993: 21) However, that both women were wholly ignorant of lesbian possibilities was more or less the argument used by the director to support the view that the characters I had created were too aware of what they were doing. Using an historical argument, the director tried to present sexual identity as a key confl ict in the plot, therefore following what Emma Donaghue criticizes about history as being ‘impoverished by rigid divisions between friendship and sex, social acceptability and deviance, innocence and experience’ (1993: 1). The director’s argument was that at that time, somebody like Marcela (from a better-off family, which in her view implied innocence) must have gone through some crisis at discovering (meaning being shown by Elisa, in her depiction of things) her sexual identity. Without a diary, letters or a written personal account, there is no way any of us could have given any historical basis for such an argument or, for that matter, the opposite. I was reluctant to accept this view. Without denying that sexual identity may be experienced as a confl ict (with oneself or, most likely, with the social environment), I refuse to accept it always has to be so. Fiction offers this kind of possibility, and there were many other options in my reading: loving another person without considering her or his sex; accepting the naturalness of sexual desire; accepting passion with women as safer than with men, which was forbidden and should be avoided; feeling free to fi nd somebody to love and to be loved by in return; and so on. A variability of knowledge and sources helps create options that may be considered more original (in both senses of the word) if we compare them with the usual heterosexual expectations about lesbian relationships. In a nutshell, the director could not conceive that, at that time, two women had simply decided to live together as a couple with the recognition of society. Therefore, she claimed their decision must have been the result

174 María Reimóndez of some other particular event. She proposed that Marcela must have had a lover and become pregnant and that was the reason they got married, arguing that it would be dishonourable at that time for women to have children out of wedlock. Curiously enough, all documents related to the case produced and analysed from a patriarchal perspective speak about an almost ‘women-only’ environment surrounding Elisa and Marcela. If Marcela had had a lover, it is unlikely that he would have remained silent about the issue as the women became notorious. Furthermore, the director used technical arguments regarding how characters had to be created and developed in fi lm to emphasize the idea that the film (and especially its characters) should not make social, feminist or lesbian claims. She also stated that their relationship was too harmonious and that one of them had to be the dominant one over the other, leading to conflicts of interest and eventually fights, which according to her was the gist of any relationship between two people, regardless of gender. This was, according to her, the engine behind the narrative structure of any movie. This view, with its professional fi lm-making wrapping, was at odds with my understanding of relationships in general, lesbian relationships in particular and the representation of lesbians in film. I argued that there are many other options for relationships, that lesbian ones did not have to necessarily mimic patriarchal heterosexual roles, in fi lm or otherwise, and that I was not ready to present a stereotypical view of the characters, especially as my reading of their story emphasized their ability to perform gender differently at different moments. After a heated discussion, the only way out was for me to accept her guidelines (showing a sexual identity crisis and using the pregnancy as the main motor for the story, though I refused to accept the stereotyping) to work on a new draft of the screenplay. I then had to stop at the intersection and try to come to terms with the new approach that I thought confl icted with a lesbian reading of Elisa and Marcela’s story. My integrity as a writer was then linked to my feeling of a common subaltern identity. That is why instead of writing one draft, I wrote two and attached an eight-page report regarding my position and the decisions made. It was at that precise moment that the theoretical background I had worked with, become familiar with and reflected upon helped me present my case, as I will now explain.

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AROUND From that confl icted intersection, I decided to take a look fi rst at the winding road of history and fiction and see how they crossed paths at some point in the past and could never be detached again. There was no need to trace the history of history, moving from stories in Greek times to a scientific approach later on, which was supposed to deprive history of any subjective aspects and focus merely on the hard facts. Academia has spent enough

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time and space discussing the political implications of understanding history as ‘the truth.’ Many trends have highlighted the fictional space that history has developed—postmodernism, feminism, queer studies and postcolonialism, among others. Linda Hutcheon has analysed the impossibility of detaching history from telling and the limits of such an approach: Arguing that history does not exist except as a text does not stupidly and ‘gleefully’ deny that the past exists, but only that accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned by textuality. We cannot know the past except through its texts: its documents, its evidence, even its eye-witness accounts are texts. (1989: 16) From a Galician perspective, criticism towards a particular view of history has also evolved, in line with criticism coming from those cases in which the term ‘nation’ stands for a peripheral or subaltern collectivity, that is, in the case of those nations whose actual limits are not defi ned by states and there is a confl ict between a majority and a minority culture. There is a constant questioning of position that has much to do with the location of the past and who owns it. In the words of Guillermo Iglesias: Concepts [such] as ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ are merely constructs used to describe, categorize and, ultimately, control those individuals who voluntarily or involuntarily choose different paths from those marked by the norm. (2010: 2) Any rewriting of the Galician past is always fraught with the tensions arising from the official readings of central Spain and the endogenous readings of what it means to belong to a language minority in a state that gives only limited rights to citizens who do not speak Spanish. This tension is also a key part of the framework that complements my political reading of history. Along this same line, the work of feminists in general and lesbian theoreticians among them has focused on recovering the history of women, even coining the term ‘herstory’ to highlight the disturbing potential of such a project. This project evolved from making women visible in history to questioning the concept of historiography itself. This was quite an organic move, as Joan Wallach Scott has explained: When the question of why these facts had been ignored and how they were now to be understood were raised, history became more than a search for facts. Since new visions of history depended on the perspectives and questions of the historian, making women visible was not simply a matter of unearthing new facts; it was a matter of advancing new interpretations which not only offered new readings of politics, but of the changing significance of families and sexuality. (1997: 13)

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Ignoring some facts and giving relevance to others was a key aspect of the conflict between the director and myself. There are several examples of this in the arguments she presented, as I will show later. The theoretical efforts to unearth lesbian history have highlighted issues related to the construction of heterosexuality as the norm and the complexities of gender projects based on a dichotomy of two sexes. It is the contention of Lilian Faderman, and I summarize her views, that lesbian history showed many times how issues related to interpretation were key to an understanding of history and how data, facts and texts could be read in a completely different way to that which patriarchal heterosexual history has traditionally favoured (Faderman 1997). The term ‘lesbian’ itself, as Amy Villarejo shows, explains that history: Lesbian stands as a reminder of the dense and richly complicated site that sexuality is and has been. To the extent that sexuality has a history, lesbian as a name for a particular pathology certainly partakes of the nineteenth-century ‘banal’ invention that Michel Foucault began to elaborate and that is at the centre of much queer theory. Lesbian names a set of inheritances from more recent moments, as well, including the legacies of the lesbian-feminist movement. . . . At the same time, lesbianism remains subject to violent erasure and abjection by cultures driven by homophobia and misogyny, including nominally progressive and queer ones. (2003: 8) Therefore, lesbians have not only been largely left out of history, but have also been inscribed in it from a pathological perspective. The contributions of feminist lesbian historians, such as those by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, have upset not only historical representations but also the methods traditionally used to gather and interpret historical data. This implies accessing sources different to those of mainstream history, such as diaries and letters, for example, moving into the private instead of the public sphere. In general, the relevance of showing history as a constructed retelling of the past is key in the sense Oram and Turnbull highlighted in their aims as historians: We aim to show how history is constructed according to present-day concerns as much as past ones, to encourage readers to look at the evidence behind different perspectives in lesbian history and to think about the theoretical and political standpoints on which our history is based. We believe there are many resonances in the past for today’s experiences and political concerns. (2001: 3) The resonances they refer to are precisely the raw materials of fiction. One example of such resonances, one that was key to the argument at hand, is the director’s assumption that Marcela must have had an identity crisis when she—in the director’s reading—was introduced to lesbianism

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by Elisa. To fight this reading, I relied on a general lesbian critique of the historical materials with which we were working, which also supported such an (heterosexual) interpretation. I tried to deconstruct the press cuttings from the time and show how both women had been so differently presented, how the idea of butch and femme was in this case a heterosexual construct that could not see beyond clothes and criminalized cross-dressing above all, thus reinforcing what Faderman claims: There were in several eras and places many instances of women who were known to engage in lesbian sex, and they did so with impunity. As long as they appeared feminine, their sexual behaviour would be viewed as an activity in which women indulged when men were unavailable or as an apprenticeship or appetite-whetter to heterosexual sex. But if one or both of the pair demanded masculine privileges, the illusion of lesbianism as faute de mieux behaviour was destroyed. At the base it was not the sexual aspect of lesbianism as much as the attempted usurpation of male prerogative by women who behaved like men that many societies appeared to fi nd most disturbing. (1997: 17) A similar example was her insistence on fi nding an ‘ultimate’ reason for the marriage. As I have already mentioned, there are many European examples of women’s marriages, and one element they share is the presentation of ‘wives’ as victims, precisely the underlying stereotype the director’s interpretation was based on. However, if Marcela had been a victim of Elisa, then she would not have continued this relationship up to their living in Buenos Aires, jail included. As Donaghue expresses: ‘We should remember that a century’s dominant ideas or the attitudes of its rulers are not the same as the private thoughts of its people’ (1993: 20). Thus, I suggested different interpretations of Elisa and Marcela’s context, for example, the fact that women of the working classes (such as Elisa and Marcela) often saw marriage as a way to have a social status that would allow them to be economically independent, something not guaranteed by their living together alone. Actually, teachers in rural areas at that time did not have the right to share the houses that the government provided. Elisa and Marcela were therefore doing something illegal by living together and could be evicted at any time. Although women used to be accompanied by their mothers or relatives to help them and keep them safe, it was always on a temporary basis. Along the same line, claiming that two women married because one of them was pregnant turns a blind eye to the historical data that indicates that in the Galician countryside, children out of wedlock were common (many of them indeed children of priests), and there was no acute social rejection, as in other parts of Spain. The director had taken Spanish history as the framework, instead of being aware of an independent Galician approach to history. This is not surprising, anyway, as readings of

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women’s history in Galicia have usually been overruled by the urgent need to develop a male-centred history of the oppression of the language-based group. At the same time, within Spanish historiography, approaches to the situation of women in non-Spanish-speaking areas have also been nonexistent. Therefore, a thick layer of silence has developed for women at large, let alone for lesbians, and somebody with little interest in listening to their voices may tend to rely on heterosexual mainstream sources for her reading, as the director seems to have done. In fact, historical approaches to the situation of women in Galicia are scarce, all the more so those coming from a feminist background and not from an anthropological point of view. The only minor exception to this rule has been the interactions between literary history and gender, undertaken by a few theoreticians and usually referring to the near past or the present. Helena Miguélez Carballeira highlights these efforts as ‘annexes of the texts that are still understood as foundational and authoritative’ (2011: n.p.). It is therefore not a surprise that general readers of Elisa and Marcela’s story rely on their general knowledge of Spanishlanguage and heterosexual historical accounts, but it was surprising, at least for me, that somebody who was to be involved in the rewriting of their lives did. Finally, a selective reading of data was also seen in the director’s interpretation of how Elisa and Marcela had their child while they were in Porto. Taking the information from Gabriel’s book at face value, one could either conclude that Marcela had had a lover and a biological child or the complete opposite. There were many rumours at that time in Porto, gathered in songs and newspaper cuttings by Gabriel, regarding the fact that Marcela was a virgin when she ‘gave birth’ and speculations regarding whether there was a father. Therefore, the selection of the voices one has to choose from is a key to the developing of any fiction based on historical accounts. The options available to narrate how this couple had a daughter may be only one—the biological pathway—if we look at the story from a heterosexual historical perspective, but many options for narration are possible if one links their experience to that of many lesbians in the past who adopted, bought or became ‘aunts’ of children when sleeping with a man was the only access to biological motherhood for lesbians. As I explained to the director, this might be an event many would abhor, in the same way that many heterosexual persons claim to abhor homosexual sexual intercourse. Another aspect of contention between both historical readings had to do with the issue of agency. I have highlighted the general lack of access to the historical materials pertaining to Galician women and lesbians that once again plays a key role in this case. In my report I tried to highlight that both Elisa and Marcela must have had some knowledge of what today we might call gay subculture. Thus, I argued that knowledge about hermaphroditism implied some connection to it, and I also stressed that, at a time when the debate in Galicia and Spain regarding women’s education

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was high on the agenda, with moderate feminists such as Emilia Pardo Bazán writing in favor of it and the male intelligentsia against it every day in the press, becoming a teacher was not only an occupational issue, it also had political implications. Put concisely, it was precisely the work of subaltern feminist and lesbian historians that really helped me show how many women had married in other places in Europe during that same period, how it was possible for Elisa and Marcela to have some knowledge of this particular option (in a comment to one of the screenplay drafts, Gabriel stated there were reports that they had read something in the press about another couple who had got married) and how Galician history had to be read also in this light.

FACING THE SCREEN However, there was still another argument used by the director to support what I considered a mainstream reading of the historical facts in Elisa and Marcela’s story: the fi lm argument. Claiming that film had its own language and structure, that it should not try to make claims of any kind for any particular group (meaning lesbians in this case), she tried to make the characters fit the mainstream line of interpretation. However, this argument seems to ignore the assertion by Iglesias that ‘fi lms provide nowadays those elements that shape the national identity and they have become one of the most powerful narrative artefacts of our time’ (2010: 3–4). It is this capacity to create meaning that so closely interacts with history at many levels in the shape of historical fi lms. Film has been analysed as a means to construct subjects, usually in psychoanalytical terms, but as Ann Kaplan already pointed out in 1983, the initial interest of the fi rst theoreticians of feminism and fi lm in the 1970s was to analyse ‘the lack of awareness about the way images are constructed through the mechanism of whatever artistic practice is involved; representations, they pointed out, are mediations, embedded through the art form of dominant ideology’ (2000: 119). Films, as Sue Thornham explains, take us back to the issue of ideology: Films structure meaning through their organisation of visual and verbal signs. It is these textual structures that we must examine because it is here, rather than in any conscious manipulation by the individual film director, that meaning is produced. Films, in short, are bearers of ideology. Ideology is defi ned here as that representational system, or ‘way of seeing’, which appears to be ‘universal’ or ‘natural’ but which is in fact the product of the specific power structures which constitute our society. (1999: 12) Though meaning is constructed by the subjects who watch a movie, there is also ideology in the process to produce the sign that triggers the

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interpretation of the subject. This is a blind spot in the field of film studies in general, which has often focused mainly on reception rather than on production as a process. Theoretical or critical approaches to film have rarely taken into account issues other than those related to the product. Relevant as they are, feminist approaches to film have moved from an analysis of stereotypes to the psychoanalytical or the representational. However, as with many other activities, power is also very much present in the production process, the place where theory and practice interact. Theory may be understood as any concept of what one is doing, and it does not have to necessarily refer to any particular academic background. I have already shown to some extent how having an academic theoretical background may help open up spaces for marginalized positions. However, much of what is contentious in some quarters has been established in theory (history as interpretation and place of power, film as a way of producing and reproducing gender roles, etc.) has not been fully incorporated into the film industry. This is of course a statement that commercial Hollywood fi lms already prove in themselves. Though the production of lesbian films has grown exponentially over the years, very few productions are distributed in commercial cinemas in the West, and representations of lesbians in mainstream films can be summarized by this statement by Alison Darren: Most people would agree that, to put it mildly, lesbians have been inadequately served by the cinema. Misrepresented and misunderstood, the images we have seen—when they have existed at all—have represented a sad gallery of interesting losers, victims, killers, neurotics, drug addicts, prostitutes and so on. We have been ridiculed, feared and pitied. Our fate has included humiliation, rape, miraculous conversion to heterosexuality and, if not, death. (2000: 3) My reluctance to accept stereotypical portrayals of lesbian relationships in film is further emphasized by Eduardo Nabal: Lesbians have been and still are the pariah of mass culture, sometimes they have been conscious fugitives, some other times they have been neglected or rendered invisible, although they have made important acts of appropriation and revision in their own right. (2007: 11) Entering the process of fi lm production rather than the product itself is also fraught with difficulties. As John T. Caldwell explains, production companies try to control any information about the process through strict nondisclosure agreements with all the parties involved in the movie-making process (2009: 169). Such attempts are difficult from a practical point of view but also necessary for a more nuanced film criticism to develop, taking into account the structures that underlie the image. One of those structures

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is precisely the screenplay. The screenplay is not only the fi rst draft of a movie; it is also a basic agreement by all parties that may later be subjected to many changes but that initially allows a team to come together and cooperate. The importance of the screenplay is examined in the work of Sánchez-Escalonilla, as summarized here. Screenplays are so crucial that writers sometimes complain that directors tend to write the screenplay themselves, as it plays such a key role in the defi nition of the fi nal product (Sánchez-Escalonilla 2008). Maybe that is why negotiations between different parties are key at this stage and why the confl ict I refer to may be understood as a relevant event from a theoretical perspective. Despite its importance, screenplay writing has never been analysed from a theoretical perspective other than as a technique and in handbooks (of which there are plenty). As the director in this controversy clearly exemplifies, we are forced to believe that writing a screenplay is a mere technical skill that one can master by mixing the appropriate ingredients and be ready to surrender to a higher power for it to alter, cut, paste, delete and change whatever they like (Sánchez-Escalonilla 2008: 15–16). There is no analysis of the role screenplay writers play in the ideological consensus for a particular film. Without trying to present here a comprehensive history of the genre of manuals and handbooks, teaching the technical skill revolves around a large list of films made (written, directed and produced) by men, with men as their main characters. Many of these handbooks tend to use masterpieces of film history to illustrate their techniques. Hardly any woman, black, lesbian/ gay, non-Western subject (maybe with the exception of some canonical Japanese films), least of all a combination of all these, has ever made it into such teaching materials, which of course tells us more about who makes the list than of the supposed quality of those either included or excluded. Too, nobody has ever analysed the type of suggestions and stereotypes that are used in such handbooks. As Sánchez-Escalonilla notes: A screenplay writer is not only a skilful technician. . . . He also feels a passion for the Humanities and the sciences of men, because men are his characters and that is how he must portray them, with the ubiquitous danger of distorting the reality he tries to recreate. (2008: 57) The book I have just quoted is in its sixth edition, therefore not an irrelevant guide for those working in screenplay writing. One of the masters of screenplay writing, Michel Chion, includes a specific section on women (less than two pages) in his Cómo se escribe un guión (eleventh Spanish edition). Let me quote this illustrative answer as to why one needs to include those two pages: Authors of screenplay writing handbooks and screenplay writers themselves set [women] apart, and they see the integration of women in screenplays that are not from the beginning ‘couple stories’ as a problem

182 María Reimóndez to be solved. A lazy screenplay writer will tend to use women as the reward for the winner, the prize for the warrior or the ornamental supplement of a story in which she is not at all essential. (2006: 102) Chion continues to explain how women were created as characters in the masterpieces he analyses in the book. He does not specifically state this conclusion but implies that they were all lazy screenplay writers, or writers who actually follow those handbooks word by word. As we have seen, women as characters, according to the writers of these handbooks, must be treated as a discreet technical question and should introduce the romantic and sexual in the story or, more specifically, the male hero’s gratification. From manuals to their implementation, screenplays are rife with stereotypes, with the negative repercussions Eduardo Nabal mentions: I think we must resist and challenge stereotypes but not avoiding any reflection on them. If, as queer theory claims following Althusser, gender and sexuality are a key part of ideology understood as ‘the imaginary relationship of subjects to their real life conditions’, cinema is, with other visual arts and spectacles, an important technology to create ways of thinking and seeing both gender and sexuality in the social world we inhabit and the position we have in it. . . . Although some creators claim or insinuate that they are beyond the political and social scenario, their works, in one way or another, are eventually part of that staging. (2007: 12–13) From my position at the intersection, I was well aware of these power struggles and of the fact that any attempt to produce alternative readings of the past tends to face some opposition, as those are the mechanisms to keep the ideological structures of the powerful in place. Maybe that is the reason why I refused to agree to the director’s reading on all these points, because I was well aware of the repercussions of such a representation of the historical past of Elisa and Marcela for the present. Fortunately, after this whole process of argumentation, the producer was convinced by my interpretation of the historical data, and the director abandoned the project. So far, my fi rst attempt to give Elisa and Marcela a voice had succeeded.

THE HORIZON Writing a screenplay in Galician about two lesbians was a challenging endeavour from the beginning. First, any work written in Galician tends to be seen as something minor and marginal; it is sometimes virtually impossible to reach a relevant audience, not because of the quality of the products, but because of the prejudice that exists both within Galicia and the rest of Spain against non-Spanish language cultural products. Against all

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odds and with little funding, Galician language literature, music and theatre have achieved some international recognition. The situation in the fi lm industry is quite different to these other sectors, maybe due to a larger need for funding and stronger barriers to distribution outside the mainstreamlanguage-dominated channels. It is therefore not surprising that there are hardly any feature films being produced in Galician, although many are produced from Galicia but in Spanish, with some exceptions such as the project ‘Un mundo de historias’ by writer and director Antón Dobao and Ignacio Vilar’s ‘Pradolongo,’ for which he could not fi nd a distributor and had to utilize alternative ways to show the work to the public. Although many times films are described as Galician if any funding is obtained in Galicia or if the producer, the majority of the cast and the crew are of Galician origin, producing and writing the story of Elisa and Marcela in Galician was already a clear statement regarding position and a claim for the subaltern to speak in her own language. Thus, if ever fi lmed, their story could mean an important breakthrough in making several layers of marginality become visible and central. However, even in the language-based margin there are other margins, those of women, lesbians, migrants and gypsies. However, according to Jerome de Groot, this completely marginal perspective is the most comprehensive when developing historical fiction because it means: Truth and fiction are problematised, as the historical mode is deployed to present fictional accounts of the past. ‘Authenticity’ is an obviously empty category, yet these series [the adaptation of Sarah Water’s novels] strive for it and deploy a variety of tropes in order to attain a semblance of it. (2009: 182) It is therefore no surprise that the advocates of authenticity have often been the fi rst to offer clearly patriarchal visions of women/lesbians/others in general, claiming truthfulness as their alibi (see De Groot [2009] for further discussion about the film adaptations of Sarah Water’s novels). This vision is further aggravated when the adaptation is for a film, due to what Claire Johnston describes as ‘the law of verisimilitude’: The law of verisimilitude (that which determines the impression of realism) in the cinema is precisely responsible for the repression of the image of woman as woman and the celebration of her non-existence. (2000: 25) Claims to authenticity and objectivity in all fields also have been clearly challenged by Marxist-Althusserian approaches. Since Althusser’s theories of ideology as constituting the subject, nothing can happen outside ideology. Therefore, everything is already filtered and interpreted; it is always partial and subjective. Of course, ideology is not only an individual phenomenon

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but also a social one. Social practices try to support mainstream ideologies in a given society or group. The key difference in interpreting data, therefore, is not whether an account, approach or rewriting of history is more objective, truthful or authentic than any other, but to what level it reproduces or challenges mainstream ideology. However, if everything is an ideological retelling, an interpretation, what is the line that divides histories from stories? The historical is supposed to take some kind of remains as its base. Some traces must exist that enable us to speak of a novel or film as historical. The past, of course, is a recurrent keyword. Still, it is not sufficient to determine the concept of the historical. We may agree that history and stories are different in the kind of artefacts they take as their base, but one thing remains the same: the actual selection of those artefacts, the methodologies by which such artefacts are recovered and the way in which those facts are interpreted are all ideological steps. What makes the difference, then, is maybe the power to claim a space in social discourse that both narratives have (what Antonio Gramsci would call hegemony). Although fiction also constructs a form of reality, history has a higher potential in this regard, precisely because it presents itself as the truth: The retelling of past narratives is also a means of control. It socializes individuals into an established social and political order and encourages them to interpret present events in terms of sanctioned narratives of the past. This restricts the scope of their present personal narratives. In other words, it circumscribes the stock of identities from which individuals may choose a social role for themselves. (Baker 2006: 21) In the case of women in general and lesbians in particular, aggravated by a peripheral language/ethnic/origin, the stock of identities produced by both histories and stories has been quite limited. Until the film is image in its fi nal form and is later interpreted by viewers, there is no complete answer to the question of how the subaltern identities of Elisa and Marcela will be forced to speak. The screenplay, as I have argued, is only one of the elements that determine the fi nal shape of the film. Production processes are living organisms in which the story may suddenly be appropriated by a dominant agent (in terms of money, prestige, origin, language, sexual orientation or all of them together), and all these efforts may not yield any result. Still, even at this point, there may be a few lessons regarding integrity in dealing with the historical for fiction that one could consider. On the one hand, the interaction between theories of history and film can help in processes that seem to be dealt with at an industrial level. It was the work of feminist and lesbian historians that helped me convince other agents of the suitability of my rewriting. Theory helps to provide a critical standpoint when dealing with historical materials of any kind, and theory fosters a search for voices that contradict, interact with

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and colour the mainstream histories we are repeatedly told. Mainstream views of the past are everywhere, but those coming from other corners have to be sought after, unearthed, excavated. Only by listening to a wide range of voices can we have any chance of making reasoned decisions to develop our stories. These aspects are all the more important when we are dealing with the historical materials of the marginalized, the subaltern. There are still so few voices out there that each one has to be considered carefully and from the inside. Relying on master narratives of history is a way of avoiding responsibility in the creation of the present. If we rely on master narratives, then Elisa and Marcela are just exceptional freaks who cannot be used as role models for the present. In the end, the past is always in the hands of the present. It can only be read from a current position, and that is why it cannot evade political responsibility. Thus, Spivak’s question has many answers. One of them is to narrate from the inside, to let a subaltern speak on behalf of an historical other. This is not to claim that my experience as a bisexual Galician-speaking woman is the answer to all the questions that speaking on behalf of the other implies, and Spivak is precisely very critical about this issue, but at least it provides a closer position to that of the subject of this herstory. Falling is not an easy experience, but the process of getting up may give us the chance to make explicit the reasons behind our choices. Speaking out and being heard is not always possible, but in this case the producer appreciated that I had taken enough time and reflection to present my choices. Many times speaking from a subaltern position means that we are not heard, and that is the fi rst stumbling block that one has to overcome. This example shows that it is not so much knowledge of the isolated facts that is important but a mistrust of the sources and a myriad of approaches, and especially a critical stand, that is, a position. That is, for me the defi nition of integrity: being aware of our own position and of the power struggles that surround it, standing at the intersection and looking around. Paths and roads continue. Nobody knows yet what the image will fi nally suggest, but integrity is maybe more relevant to the process than the product. Integrity means we try our best to show that there is a different way of telling stories, reading the past and therefore living.

REFERENCES Anzaldúa, G. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Spinsters Aunt Lute. Albarracín Soto, M. 2008. ‘Libreras y tebeos: Las voces de las lesbianas mayores.’ In Lesbianas. Discursos y representaciones, edited by R. Platero, 190–212. Barcelona: Melusina. Baker, M. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London: Routledge. Chion, M. 2006. Cómo se escribe un guión. Madrid: Cátedra. Cadwell, J. T. 2009. ‘Screen Studies and Industrial “Theorizing.’” Screen 50 (1): 167–79.

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Darren, A. 2000. Lesbian Film Guide. London: Cassell. de Gabriel , N. 2008. Elisa e Marcela: Alén dos homes. Vigo: Nigratea. de Groot, J. 2009. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Donoghue, E. 1993. Passions between Women. London: Scarlett. Faderman, L. 1997. Surpassing the Love of Men. London: Women’s Press. Harwood, R. 2008. ‘The Art of Adaptation.’ In The Screenwriter’s Handbook 2009, edited by B. Turner. London: MacMillan, 12–15. Hutcheon, L. 1989. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Iglesias Díaz, G. 2010. ‘Fiction Narrative and National Identity: Re-Writing History in Galicia through Film with a Carpenter Pencil.’ Paper presented at the fourteenth International Culture and Power Conference, ‘Identity and Identification,’ Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Johnston, C. 2000. ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, in A. Kaplan, Feminism and Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miguélez-Carballeira, H. Forthcoming. ‘A man na segadora: Nación patriarcal e historiografía literaria.’ In Saíndo da nación: máis aló do nacional na produción cultural galega contemporánea, edited by K. Hooper and H. MiguélezCarballeira. Santiago: Laiovento. Mulvey, L. 2000. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ In Feminism and Film, edited by E. A. Kaplan, 34–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nabal, E. 2007. El marica, la bruja y el armario: Misoginia gay y homofobia feminina en el cine. Barcelona: Egales. Oram, A., and A. Turnbull. 2001. The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970. London: Routledge. Sánchez-Escalonilla, A. 2008. Estrategias de guión cinematográfico, Barcelona: Ariel. Smith-Rosenberg, C. 1997. ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.’ In Feminism and History, edited by J. Wallach Scott, 366–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spivak, G. C. 1985. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.’ Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring): 120–30. Thornham, S. 1999. ‘Introduction.’ In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by S. Thornham, 1–13. New York: New York University Press. Villarejo, A. 2003. Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wallach Scott, J. 1997. Feminism and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. All translations by the author.

11 Historians in Fiction and Film Dave Mosler and Jessica Murrell ‘I got tired of dating him for many reasons but especially because he dressed too much like a historian.’ —Elizabeth Taylor

Historians have always featured in the intellectual and cultural life of societies, whether they are preindustrial hunting-and-gathering societies or settled and modern civilizations. In preindustrial cultures, both those that were tribal and local as well as vast civilizations, they were storytellers: people who were central to the construction of the ‘human’ and who narrated the history of the nation both to the culture in which they were situated and to the broader world. In the classical period of Greek culture, historians appeared as major intellectual figures like Herodotus (ca. 484– 425, the ‘father of history’) and Thucydides (ca. 460–395) who both elaborated the national narratives for their respective cultures. Subsequently, in Western culture historians played a major role in the telling of history and providing historical paradigms within which intellectuals and the political classes debated history, philosophy and revolution. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1893), Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), Marc Bloch (1886–1944), Paul Kennedy (1945–) and Simon Schama (1945–) are a few in a much larger sample from the modern era who have performed these functions. But in the wider culture outside the realms of the intellectual classes and the walls of academe, how have historians been perceived, and how have these crucial figures of the world of ideas been portrayed? In analysing the portrayal of historians in fiction and film, a number of issues are raised about those who use the work of historians from the numerous media who employ historical materials. The users of history must judge the integrity of the historians, the objectivity of the historical methods employed and the substantive conclusions reached by those endeavours. Similarly, the users of history must maintain the integrity of the historical subjects they are examining and take care they do not abuse or misuse either the historians or their work in the process. In the following discussion of historians in fiction and film, the reader is invited to keep

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these issues in mind, for the authors and fi lmmakers included in this analysis all raise these crucial issues of the integrity of historical research and the uses to which it is put. The users of history, therefore, have the challenge of making choices which respect the researching, writing and production of history as well as respect for those who engage in the process. Intellectual figures have decreased their profile in the twenty-fi rst century even though, paradoxically, ideas (mostly determined by secular values and ratiocination) govern many aspects of ‘human’ existence. ‘Great’ authors are fewer, and academics have become more obscure and isolated in universities (some would say in self-imposed exile by concentrating on abstruse postmodernist issues and topics). In the eyes of the public are entertainment figures, sports stars, politicians, gangsters and others, such as Paris Hilton, who are simply famous for being famous without any obvious talent. In light of these cultural changes, the profile of the historian has decreased over the twentieth century and into the twenty-fi rst century, and with the exception of a few multimedia performers (such as America-based British academic and television superstar Simon Schama), they rarely attract media attention or register in the minds of the average citizen. Despite these limitations, historians have made appearances in fiction and film, and an examination of these can tell us a great deal about how historians and intellectuals have been presented to the wider public. Historians write about people, places and events over time and venture opinions, some highly personal and ideological, about the characters they analyse and observe. But how do the intellectual classes from whence they come and the general public perceive them? Let us turn the tables on historians who write history and historical novels and see how they are depicted in the media of which they are usually the analysts and not the subjects.

FICTION The historical profession as a structured discipline developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was especially influenced by the formalization of historical research in Germany following the ideas of Leopold von Ranke and the establishment of graduate programs in history. Although historians existed before this and history departments were already established, this created a discipline dedicated to empirical research and cemented the PhD’s crucial role as the central training mode of achieving and maintaining research objectives among historical practitioners. The discipline of history with a Rankean flavour soon spread across the Atlantic world and became a major force in American university life and culture. This led to the creation of the American Historical Association in 1884 and the growth of large and vibrant history departments in the Ivy League and the larger state universities across the nation. President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9) was a strong supporter of history and served as

Historians in Fiction and Film 189 the president of the AHA in 1912. One of the fi rst literary portrayals of an historian, however, did not come until 1925 when the noted southern-born and Nebraska-raised writer Willa Cather (1873–1947) included a historian as the protagonist in The Professor’s House. Cather’s protagonist is an attractive middle-aged historian named Godfrey St. Peter who, like most characters to be examined in this survey of fictional historians, is experiencing a midlife crisis. Looking back on his career of teaching and research he accepts that ‘life doesn’t turn out for any of us as we plan’ (Cather 1925: 23). His major work of scholarship, Spanish Adventurers in North America, has not been received as well as he had hoped, and he states somewhat sadly that he may as well have thrown the fi rst three volumes of the eight-volume work into Lake Michigan. He fi nds the past a better place in which to dwell and laments what he views as the low level of intellectual life in contemporary American society. He fi nds research is increasingly commercialized and believes the ‘aim to “show results”’ is ‘undermining and vulgarising education’ (140). As a reaction to these changing conditions in the work environment and to the larger cultural shift into twentieth-century modernization, St. Peter complains about the prospect of moving into his newly built house, only uses electricity in his study when the oil in his lamp has run out, and describes himself as ‘a creature of habit’ (27, 153). Cather’s historian is represented as an intellectual whose ardour for life has cooled and for whom the realities of the institutional academic routine have seriously begun to outweigh the pleasures and exhilaration of youth, when he considered teaching and researching history to be a most exciting career. Taken together, these characteristics form part of a collection of themes we shall repeatedly encounter in this chapter. No picture of historians in the transatlantic English-speaking world is more amusing, and probably no satirical attack on history teaching more devastating, than Kingsley Amis’s (1922–95) classic Lucky Jim, which was published in 1953. Amis gives no quarter to the quirks and jealous culture of provincial university life and the competition for status, love and power among academic historians in mid-twentieth-century England. Throughout his long and illustrious career Amis was a controversial writer and refused to avoid divisive and sensitive topics such as racism and sexism (a tradition continued by his son Martin). His rapier wit and sharp tongue are deployed at full strength in Lucky Jim, in which he takes on the intellectual culture of England and the universities with which he had an abundant wealth of experience after a long career of writing about, drinking with and provoking the London-based society of intellectuals, writers and academics. Lucky Jim’s protagonist, Jim Dixon, is a medieval historian on probation in a provincial English university for which he has no respect and in a department headed by Professor Welch, whom he intensely dislikes and perceives as an intellectual fraud (‘how had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this?’ [Amis 1953: 8]). Dixon, a

190 Dave Mosler and Jessica Murrell short and unimpressive-appearing chap, is struggling to get an article on medieval shipbuilding techniques published, which he hopes will tip the balance of tenure in his favour. Everything, not surprisingly, is running against him, for he is a chain-smoking alcoholic and his private life is a series of mishaps and failures. Moreover, his commitment to medieval history is thin at best. As he tells a colleague, he chose medieval history because it was a ‘soft option’ (Amis 1953: 33). Dixon further questions the work of historians and admits that, despite the potential for history to ‘do people a hell of a lot of good . . . in practice, it doesn’t work out like that. Things get in the way . . . bad teaching’s the main thing’ (218). Dixon’s disillusionment and self-doubt send him into a downward spiral, and when he shows up to give a major public lecture considerably drunk, he loses his job in the history department. Lucky Jim is a condemnation of virtually all aspects of academic life. Amis portrays a world of egocentric and fraudulent intellectuals in an institution that badly serves the community, the students and the society at large. History is represented as a kind of ‘racket,’ the practitioners of which lack interest in their work and/or their university and pursue pleasure through predatory sexual relationships (Amis 1953: 27–28, 97). Other activities are presented as more socially valuable (such as the artistic work of Professor Welch’s son, Bertrand). In fact, Dixon’s failure in the academy is, ultimately, represented as a blessing in disguise; the novel’s ending suggests Dixon is ‘lucky’ to have escaped academe and, by implication, a life of tortuous boredom and lack of fulfilment. With Malcolm Bradbury’s (1932–2000) The History Man (1975) we are offered a tale about a sociologist but the title, and the main character’s intellectual preoccupations, compel us to include it in this survey. Along with David Lodge’s Changing Places, which we will consider later, this classical campus novel was published in a year blessed with brilliant and acerbic critiques of academic life.2 Bradbury was a distinguished academic and writer whose lectures on history and literature earned him a considerable reputation across the globe. The picture of academic life presented in Bradbury’s novel is no more appealing than it was in Amis’s Lucky Jim some twenty years before. It is set in the 1970s in Britain, and the revolutionary cultural values fi rst exploding in America in the 1960s have spread across the English-speaking world. The History Man’s protagonist, sociology lecturer Howard Kirk, is a character who combines musings on historical change with an attack on the mores of 1970s British middle-class culture. He is obsessed with history and believes he is participating in a watershed period, which will shift the paradigm of Western culture in a quasi-Marxist turn of the historical cycles. He frequently refers to the Hegelian dialectic (employed, of course, by Marx) and believes himself to be a player in the inexorable pattern of historical change (Bradbury 1975: 86, 90, 101). By participating in the new wave of freedom that emerged in the 1960s—an excuse for endless sexual

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encounters?—Kirk believes himself to be both an observer and participant in a new and revolutionary historical epoch. Thus he is dubbed the ‘history man’ by a colleague: both a teacher and a maker of history (106). Although Kirk is not strictly speaking an historian, the grandiosity of his vision marks him as another example of the characterization of the fictional academic as narcissistic and predatory. Kirk comes from a working-class background, and although he maintains a constant attack on the bourgeoisie, which aligns him with the ideology of the radical 1960s and 1970s, he in fact lives a very middleclass lifestyle. He and his wife, Barbara, have an ‘open’ relationship and, as with Amis and Lodge, these characters’ personal lives and relationships are represented as chaotic at best. Kirk’s professional life does not provide him with fulfilment; he questions the value of university teaching and has a most jaundiced view of the students he is meant to educate. He requires his students to accept his view of history and sociology and does not encourage independent thought. For example, his response to a divergent view from a student is authoritarian: ‘You either accept some sociological principles, or you fail’ (Bradbury 1975: 138). Despite this uncompromising stance, Kirk also exhibits scepticism towards his own methodology when he states that ‘there are times when just what happened is just what happened,’ thus questioning the very Hegelian dialectic he is forcing his students to accept (113). In short, Howard Kirk is represented as a thoroughly unpleasant character whom it is difficult to imagine students wishing to select as a lecturer. A literary representation of a more opportunistic and self-serving intellectual cum academic would be hard to fi nd.3 Thus far, this chapter has focused on the representation of the historian in fiction, yet perhaps one could do no better to gain insights into academic life in general than with someone writing not about an historian but about academics teaching English literature. One would expect a jaundiced view of the academic enterprise from outside the academy, but it is arguable that no author has presented a more sardonic and critical view than the brilliant English novelist, English literature academic, arts administrator and critic David Lodge. In Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work, his very funny and very insightful trilogy based on his teaching experience on exchange at UC Berkeley in 1969, he lampoons all aspects of academic life in general and his own discipline in particular.4 Although Lodge focuses on English scholarship, most of what he has to say would apply equally to historians functioning in much the same environment as their English colleagues. Indeed, Lodge does take a special delight in lampooning postmodernist literary theory but, as we will see below in our discussion of José Saramago’s The Double, much of this also now applies to historical writing, which has also been greatly affected by postmodernist paradigms. Nothing escapes Lodge’s critical eye: academics’ pretensions, their egocentrism and narcissism, their opportunistic approach to academic life, their messy personal lives, their endlessly divisive faculty political

192 Dave Mosler and Jessica Murrell culture and, in the end, their careerist orientation and lack of any real intellectual commitment to academic work. In Changing Places, the first volume of the trilogy, protagonists Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, who exchange jobs in England and America, have few admirable traits. Indeed, both are represented as failures, either professionally (Swallow) or in their personal lives (Zapp). Although Zapp and Swallow are very different personalities (Zapp is the stereotypical American with an aggressive personality whereas Swallow is the stereotypical laconic Englishman who lacks urgency in life), they are both represented as having quite sceptical views of academic life and the publish-or-perish mentality in particular. Academic work is represented as arcane and/or ridiculous and requiring little specialized knowledge. For example, Zapp believes ‘any clown with a PhD should be able to teach English’ (Lodge 1975: 151–52). Neither Zapp nor Swallow are satisfied with their careers, and both suffer from depression about their profession and the style and quality of the universities in which they teach. All of this is compounded, as with Amis and Bradbury, by the characters’ chronic-yet-comedic complications both in their sex lives and in their relationships with colleagues (and their wives and daughters, it must be added). As with Amis and Bradbury, it is difficult to imagine anyone reading Lodge’s trilogy would be inspired to enter the realm of academe. A sorry state of affairs for historians, both personally and professionally, runs through the literature as a strong and persistent leitmotif. To this point, this chapter has focused on the representation of the historian in what could broadly be described as ‘campus literature,’ but the genre of crime fiction, which has been extraordinarily popular in the early twenty-fi rst century, has also taken up the historian-as-protagonist.5 In many ways this was caused by two obvious factors. First, some writers trained in history have used their experience as creative fodder. Second, historians seek out facts and try to fi nd the truth. The training of historians and the teleological nature of their work, then, align very closely with the work of the detective, which is central to many crime fiction narratives. This is the case with English crime fiction writers Robert Goddard (1954–) and Michael Ridpath (1961–), who studied history as undergraduates at Cambridge and Oxford universities, respectively. Both Goddard and Ridpath bring their enthusiasm for history and historical enquiry to bear in their writing, where they install the figure of the historian as a hero in search of truths involving historical documents and historical conundrums interwoven with complex mysteries and murders. In Past Caring (1986) Goddard’s protagonist Martin Radford, a Cambridge history graduate, pursues Edwin Strafford, a former cabinet minister from prime minister H. H. Asquith’s years (1908–16), who retired to the island of Madeira with a secret diary. Strafford’s brilliant career was truncated by a series of curious and unexplained events and, in the novel, a wealthy history enthusiast, Leo Sellick, engages Radford to solve the mystery. Radford, whose time as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the

Historians in Fiction and Film 193 1960s has left him with a most jaundiced view of the ancient university (a ‘pampered, narcissistic and overweening’ place), attempts to unravel a host of personal and historical conundrums that draw on his historical skills and curiosity (Goddard 1986: 205). In line with the generic conventions of crime fiction, this inevitably leads to a complex tale involving romance, twists and turns, dangers and double-crossed participants. Like many of the protagonists we have met in this chapter, Radford’s views on history and its heuristic value are sceptical, and his personal history is similarly pervaded by failures, excessive drinking and broken relationships (164). Thus, again, we are presented with an historian who has a low opinion of history teaching, his fellow historians and, indeed, of himself. He even has a shady past involving sexual relations with an underage student, which lost him his job as a history teacher (260). Yet, unlike the historians thus far encountered in this chapter, Radford pursues his sleuthing with rigor. He is dedicated to uncovering the facts and, in spite of his past record of failure in the profession, has a high regard for fi nding the historical truth about Edwin Strafford and for his career. He is sceptical about the other historian in the novel, Eve Randall, whom he regards as a deceptive careerist (260) and makes it clear that he seeks the empirical facts and the historical truth for its own sake. For Radford, history should not be ‘so cerebral’ but should solve the real life problems of real people (24). In the end, he dedicates himself to this task and emerges a quasi hero, which partly mitigates his sense of failure as a professional historian (and as a husband and father). Goddard continues many of these themes in Sight Unseen (2005), in which protagonist David Umber, a PhD student gone astray, is witness to the abduction of a child during a visit to a famous prehistoric site at Avebury in Wiltshire. Umber has abandoned his doctoral research into the authorship of the letters of ‘Junius,’ a real historical eighteenth-century collection of letters that gives great detail about the politics of the period for which the author’s identity has never been defi nitively identified (Goddard 2005: 23, 84, 86). His life has a ‘sense of drift and purposelessness’ like all of the historians we have encountered in this survey. Yet, unlike these figures, Umber’s purposelessness comes from his withdrawal from academe rather than his embeddedness in this milieu. Indeed, Umber’s desire to continue his enquiry into the identity of Junius, although his PhD work is in suspension, indicates his historical curiosity has not diminished (42). The challenge of doing some sleuthing and detective work (with the retired Inspector Sharp), however, offers him the opportunity to do research in the real world rather than the academic world of postgraduate studies, which he found to be of ‘questionable relevance’ (14). He is offered help in his research by someone who does not show up and instead witnesses this abduction. This pulls him into a plot of thrilling and historical dimensions that develops over two decades. Umber seeks a solution to both the identity of Junius and the perpetrator of the crimes.

194 Dave Mosler and Jessica Murrell Umber therefore sets off with his retired policeman companion and fellow sleuth to solve the cold case and rekindle his historical PhD topic, which he abandoned for a girlfriend who ‘rapidly became more important to [him] than a PhD of questionable relevance to anything’ (Goddard 2005: 42). The quest to solve a ‘real world’ mystery holds more attraction than the abstract work of professional historian, but he does hold strong views about the positive nature of pursuing truth over time. In the end Umber does achieve success, and a new personal relationship but, like Radford in Past Caring, does not return to the world of the professional historian. For him, the world of sleuthing eventually provides fulfilment whereas academic work did not. Ridpath picks up similar themes in The Predator (2001), in which protagonist Chris Szczypiorski, an entrepreneur caught up in the intricacies of international business, attempts to track down the killer of his business partner, Lenka, with the help of his American girlfriend, Megan. Megan is a history PhD student at Cambridge on a fellowship for six months on leave from the University of Chicago. At Chicago she is a specialist in medieval European and British history and is highly excited by the atmosphere at Cambridge and the mystery in which she fi nds herself entangled. Megan, however, is not strictly a scholar and is easily distracted. She is the recipient of a fi rst-rate education, an undergraduate at the elite small college of Amherst before she went on to graduate school at Chicago, but she still does not appear to be terribly dedicated intellectually. She tells Chris that she chose the topic of her PhD, monastic reform in tenth-century England, because the object is to ‘study some tiny subject simply because it’s so obscure no on else can be bothered to write about it’ (Ridpath 2001: 130). She is also represented as an indecisive and rather fragile personality, however, and is easily manipulated by Eric, the main villain in the plot, whose double dealings and crimes are eventually uncovered by the hero, Chris. In both her analytical skills and her concentration on empirical facts, Megan is neither a strong advertisement for graduate studies nor for the historical profession. As a secondary figure in the novel, however, she adds to our profile of historians whose intellectual energies are easily displaced by sex, adventure (or as she puts it, the mysteries and romance of the ‘dark ages’) and, in her case, by an archvillain of most unpleasant dimensions (190). In Goddard’s and Ridpath’s works, the historians are represented as suffering from many of the characteristics we have seen in the ‘campus literature’ of Cather, Amis, Bradbury and Lodge. They are portrayed as weak and ineffectual, and they do not stick to their career paths with much persistence. They have a tendency to be easily sidetracked and to express feelings of unease about their chosen profession. Concomitant with these personality traits are the characters’ somewhat messy and inadequate social relations. Across the channel in France, we see a similar combination of factors. With a new and exciting crime writer, Xavier-Marie Bonnot, we again see personal experience as an historian channelled into crime fiction

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writing. Bonnot has a PhD in history and sociology, and he writes about his beloved Provence with his hero, the grizzled and tough commandant Michel de Palma.6 In the fi rst of his two novels featuring this protagonist, The First Fingerprint (2008; the second is The Beast of Camargue [2009]), the case involves the death of a prehistorian at a university in Aix-en-Provence. The plot need not delay us for long (it quickly moves into the bizarre prehistoric cannibalistic rituals of Neolithic man), but the departmental relationships revealed are most familiar to us by now. The clique of history professors involved in the narrative are represented as competitive and ruthless, and they carry their competition with each other to the ultimate conclusion for a crime fiction plot: murder. Although this certainly does not correspond to the daily realities of academic life, the metaphor is clear. Academic life is a ‘dog-eat-dog’ struggle for status, money and reputation. In The First Fingerprint, nothing appears to be too risky to consider in securing these aims. Our penultimate example of a fictional historian comes from the recently deceased Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago (1922–2010). In his curious novel The Double (2002) Saramago takes on the intriguing question of the relationship between history and identity. Saramago’s protagonist, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, is a secondary-school history teacher, but like his fictional colleagues, he is depressed, dissatisfied with and alienated from his chosen profession and his fellow teachers. He is represented as a failure in love and sex and faces a rather grim and unstimulating future. When a colleague suggests he rent a film called The Race is to the Swift, Afonso is shocked to discover that one of the actors is his exact double. Saramago weaves his intriguing tale around Afonso’s pursuit of his double, an actor named Antonio Claro (real name Daniel Santa Clara), using the narrator as a commentator to criticize and ridicule Afonso, who drifts to a tragicyet-unexpected ending. The idiosyncratic style of the novel, however, does little to obscure many of the themes we have identified in this chapter: The scepticism with which history and historians are viewed and the charge that historical analysis is subjective and fraught with philosophical and methodological difficulties. Moreover, a primer to encourage someone to teach high-school history, this is not; Afonso’s vocation is consistently viewed as ‘ordinary,’ that is, as a prosaic activity that is of little significance in the broad scheme of life (Saramago 2002: 2, 31, 184). In other words, teaching history to secondary-school students is portrayed as a job for low achievers and those lacking in ambition. The Double, in its Kafkaesque exploration of the relationship between thought, embodiment and subjectivity, can also be read as presenting a postmodern critique of history-as-metanarrative. As we shall also see in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, the reliability of historical investigation is called into question, and the utility of history as an explanatory force for life is represented as dubious as best and useless at worst. Saramago and Bellow appear to have grown sceptical of Hegelian optimism about the nature of

196 Dave Mosler and Jessica Murrell history. Saramago’s Afonso, for example, has ‘for some time viewed sweet History, the serious educational subject which he had felt called upon to teach and which could have been a soothing refuge for him, as a chore without meaning and a beginning without end’ (Saramago 2002: 1). In spite of Saramago’s dedication in his personal life to Marxism (including, therefore, the Hegelian dialectic), and the political values and causes of the Left, little of the progressive and ultimately utopian end to history appears in the mind of Afonso. Indeed, Afonso appears to have abandoned all hope in history as a progressive process that can be identified through historical investigation and lead to a fi nal phase of history culminating in a just and socialist classless society. History, like Afonso’s life, is full of bitterness and meaninglessness and headed for an unpleasant climax. Although he attempts to make sense of his situation, as with the historian-detectives in the crime fiction of Goddard, Ridpath and Bonnot, in the end there is no answer: We do not know the difference between the original Afonso and the copy. In The Double, history does not give meaning to life, for in the fi nal analysis, life does not have an inherent and discoverable rationality whether one attempts to examine it though historical investigation or any other exercise in the powers of ratiocination. Many other writers have ventured into the field of ‘campus literature’ or focused on academics and university life in their work. Two of the most prominent come from American writer Saul Bellow and England’s A. S Byatt. Although their protagonists are a philosopher and a student of English literature, respectively, they amplify most of the themes about historians (and academics) that we have identified in this chapter. In the classic novel Herzog (1964), written by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow (1915–2005), protagonist Moses Herzog is a writer and academic whose career as a philosophy professor (specializing in the history of ideas) and life have floundered. Herzog and Bellow are very similar: Both were the same age, born and raised in Canada, Jewish, came from Russian émigré parents, lived in Chicago, divorced twice (Bellow ultimately divorced four times with five marriages), and were the sons of bootlegger fathers. Moreover, Bellow is well known for using his circle of friends as the basis for characters (most important, Valentine Gersbach, who was based on Bellow’s long-time friend Jack Ludwig who had an affair with Bellow’s second wife, Sondra). Throughout the novel Herzog discusses a wide range of literary and philosophical topics as he tries to stabilize himself through his midlife crisis and a nervous breakdown. Herzog is a story of alienation and failure and, ultimately, the inadequacies of academic life as it shows Herzog, arguably the defi nitive literary representation of the academic-asnarcissist, struggling to complete his latest scholarly work. Herzog’s life and professional career are represented as being on a downward spiral since, as we are told, he ‘made a brilliant start in his PhD thesis . . . but the rest of his ambitious projects had dried up, one after another’ (Bellow 1964: 4). He doubts his capacities as a teacher and scholar,

Historians in Fiction and Film 197 and his mind and body are portrayed as having similarly deteriorated with the ravages of inexorable decay, ageing and self-doubt (121). His personal life provides little comfort, and his lifetime of womanizing, sexual adventures and neglect of his children have left him without family support. His failure as pedagogue, father and husband renders him sceptical about his life’s purpose, and he increasingly fi nds this personal void to be a microcosm of the void in history in general. Like Saramago’s Afonso, Herzog declares Hegel’s argument that the ‘essence of human life is to be derived from history’ is ‘all wrong,’and he fi nds this observation both amusing and depressing (162). Herzog has clearly reached the end of the line intellectually and professionally, for his eight-hundred page magnum opus lies unfi nished ‘in his closet,’ never to see the light of day, for he declares it to be full of ‘chaotic argument’ and unworthy to go on to a publisher (4, 207, 265). Herzog appears to have reached an ‘existential’ phase of life in which the layers of existence no longer appear to have any meaning. Although he is an intellectual historian, Herzog fi nds it difficult to justify continuing his personal narrative: family, life, career, the historical process and the unfolding of time reveal no purpose, no teleological direction and no eschatological end. In short, Herzog is terminal. Academic life also features in A. S. Byatt’s (1936–) four volumes in the Frederica Quartet, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), which tell the story of the Potter family and protagonist Frederica’s time at Cambridge in English literature. In this quartet, Byatt, a writer and London academic from a distinguished family of intellectuals, which includes her sister, the noted novelist Margaret Drabble, chronicles the lives of a Yorkshire family and the relationship between two sisters in particular. Included among the broader theme of English family life are the experiences of the protagonist as she navigates through her intellectual awakening in the hallowed halls and cloisters of Cambridge. One could continue with many other depictions of university life (and, indeed, this chapter has prepared the ground for more research in this area). However, the common themes running though fiction about academics and historians now appear clear. It is time and appropriate to examine another medium, that of film, to compare and contrast with fiction in order to ascertain if the portrayal of historians is consistent across numerous media.

FILM One does not, of course, associate historians with being probable figures as protagonists in fi lms, especially in the (post)modern era dominated by blockbuster fi lm-making focusing on action and drama. The halls of academe are not normally associated with tense melodrama, action thrillers and the high emotions of war and revolution. Indeed, the historian-detectives in

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the crime fiction of Goddard and Ridpath are conspicuously disconnected from the academy. Nevertheless, there are some popular narrative films (including action thrillers) that feature historians as protagonists. How do these portrayals compare and contrast with those we have seen in fiction? Does film, which is an audio-visual medium that has the potential to reach a much larger audience, differ in its representation both of the professional historian and of academic life in general? Edward Albee (1928–), the provocative and enduring American playwright, brought his classic play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to the stage in 1962, and it was made into a fi lm starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1966. Albee’s considerably controversial play, which featured explicit language and frank discussions of sex, opened on Broadway in the middle of the political tensions from the Cuban Missile Crisis. When it was made into a fi lm four years later, it continued to provoke widespread debate. Despite the notoriety of its subject matter, the fi lm was highly acclaimed. It received thirteen Academy Award nominations and took out five awards, including Best Actress for Taylor and Best Supporting Actress for Sandra Dennis. Set on the campus of a small New England college, an obscure four-year institution called New Carthage (an institution whose name is ironic given that it is hardly akin to the ‘great’ civilization), it is focused on the volatile and often violent relationship between associate professor of history, George (Burton), and his crude and aggressive wife, Martha (Taylor), who is the college president’s daughter. The painful and increasingly divisive marriage (the added spice to which was the fraught marriage of Taylor and Burton in real life) is portrayed through the course of an evening when a newly appointed instructor in biology, the brilliant but naïve Nick, and his wife Honey are invited to dinner by Martha. Here, George and Martha’s ‘guests’ are witness to a series of horrific exchanges and incidents between the couple, culminating in humiliation and degradation for all. The picture of academic life presented in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is familiar: petty jealousies, competition between wives, weak personal relationships and little dedication to scholarship. George cannot remember why he was motivated to teach and is ridiculed by Martha for his lack of ambition or, as she puts it, for being perpetually ‘bogged down in the history department,’ unable to rise through the hierarchy of the college. Although the heart of the play and film is an attack on marriage by the noted ideologue of gay causes Albee, at a time when most gay and/or lesbian theory viewed marriage as a failed heterosexual institution, academe is central to the narrative and is represented as anything but an arena in which detached academics pursue contemplative and serious intellectual lives. Like many of the fictional protagonists examined in this chapter, both George and Martha view life through a haze of alcohol, with neither offering a model of academic integrity or dedication to the life of the college. Marathon Man (1976) is a thriller, directed by John Schlesinger and based on the novel of the same name that was written by William

Historians in Fiction and Film 199 Goldman. The film stars Dustin Hoffman as a graduate student of history at Columbia University. Hoffman plays Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy, a PhD candidate researching in the same field as his father, who committed suicide as a result of investigations into his political views in the cold-war era suffused with McCarthyism. Babe, however, is disillusioned with his research, which his brother, Doc (Roy Scheider), calls ‘bullshit’ and which his colleague Professor Biesenthal (Fritz Weaver) views as a ‘hysterical crusade’ to avenge his father’s death. Moreover, Professor Biesenthal is sceptical of the entire academic enterprise of ‘manufacturing doctorates’ and tells Babe and his fellow postgraduate students that he hopes they ‘all fail.’ Babe is politically positioned on the Left and hopes to attack the ‘tyranny in American political life’ in which American freedoms are subjected to assaults such as when President Coolidge (1924–29) used the Boston police to break a strike, Franklin Roosevelt (1933–45) interned Japanese citizens during World War II and of course Senator Joe McCarthy’s cold-war campaigns. However, Babe is easily distracted from his life as a researcher to become an historian-detective similar to the crime-fiction characters we have already examined. Indeed, the film spends little time depicting Babe’s work as an historian because it is essentially concerned with a complex action plot involving Nazism, Jewish holocaust issues, and cold-war angst. Nevertheless, the would-be historian pursues his (new) objectives with a zeal and thoroughness befitting a good historian. The historical context is presented well and the film was highly acclaimed, with Laurence Olivier receiving a Golden Globe for his supporting role as Dr. Christian Szell. Thus it is arguable that Marathon Man is more interesting for its representation of historical issues of high magnitude rather than portraying the life of a working professional historian. In the end it appears that Babe will not continue his historical career but, in line with the tendency for 1970s ‘New’ Hollywood films to refuse narrative closure, this is not definitively decided. Historians of different varieties have also featured in more contemporary blockbuster fi lms wherein, like in Marathon Man, their skills as problem solvers have been employed. This can be seen in the fi lm adaptations of Dan Brown’s (1964–) The Da Vinci Code (2003) and Angels and Demons (2000), which have set records around the world in book sales and box office receipts and feature an art historian as protagonist. In these narratives, Brown’s swashbuckling hero, Harvard University symbologist and art historian Robert Langdon, brings all the skills of the historiansleuth to bear on a quasi-historical plot involving the Catholic Church and its alleged conspiracies, mysterious political interventions and myriad other strange and wonderful mysteries that have been percolating in the historical imagination (we strongly emphasize imagination) for centuries. Although this may not be history in the empirical, professional sense, it certainly has captured the attention of millions of people around the world. The books and film adaptations based upon Brown’s books have touched many raw nerves in the Catholic Church and in the broader Catholic community. Brown has taken some historical speculation and even some legitimate

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subjects from the fields of church history, comparative biblical studies and historical archaeology to weave together a series of tales that have little resemblance to well-documented historical study but which stimulate the interests of a wider public. It is difficult to pin down the precise formula that leads to this type of global success story, but whatever it is, Brown appears to possess it. In the The Da Vinci Code (2006), which was directed by Ron Howard, Tom Hanks plays Langdon who is portrayed as a good and stimulating teacher. As we have seen so often in this chapter, Langdon is confronted by those who are sceptical of historical objectivity. He debates with the rich, aristocratic historian Sir Leigh Teabing (Sir Ian McKellen) who argues that history is cluttered, biased and subjective; Teabing complains, ‘when history is written murderers become heroes.’ Later in the fi lm Langdon confesses his own doubts about his work when he tells Sophie (Audrey Tautou) that he has been called ‘a flat foot, a beat cop of history, a dumb policeman who just does his job day after day of history.’ Langdon, like Babe in Marathon Man, is enthralled by the pursuit of truth and action in real life investigations and takes up Teabing’s challenge to make history rather than observe it as a detached investigator. Teabing declares, ‘You and I are in history now . . . implicated.’ Like the novel on which it is based, The Da Vinci Code opened to great controversy, with the Catholic Church calling upon its faithful to boycott the film. The historicity of the film, of course, is no better than the book upon which it is based and is therefore hardly an advertisement for empirically based and seriously researched history. Its plot is a syncretistic mixture of historical truths, semifictitious facts, rumours and mythology which, like Brown’s novel, has high commercial value and undoubtedly struck a chord in the general public. His historian, however, does not bear much resemblance to a working art historian. In spite of teaching at the most exalted university in America, Harvard, which is usually ranked number one in the world, it could be argued that the film’s representation of the academic bears little resemblance to the ‘original’ article from the world of working professional historians. Thus the representation of historians in film appears to be consistent with fiction. Again, the historian is not represented as an attractive figure but, rather, has many predatory and aggressive characteristics. Again, the characters’ personal lives are replete with confl ict and even violence, and gender relations are always strained.

CONCLUSION Examining the representation of the historian in fiction and film provides insights in many aspects of modern culture. It tells us about the historian as an academic and the culture in which he or she—with the exceptions

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of Eve Randall in Goddard’s Past Caring and Megan in The Predator, most persistently he—lives and works. The foibles of academic life are revealed, and the tensions of universities are examined in painful detail. It also reveals much about the objectives and methodology of history writing, for the historian must seek out the truth, or get as close as possible to truth, by sifting though the empirical facts. This forces the historian to consider conundrums such as the nature of truth and the epistemology of history, as well as the issue of whether one can ever approach historical truth in any absolute sense, which has been the preoccupation of so much postmodernist thought in the past two or three decades (although this has been an issue among historians since the ‘value free’ debates in the 1960s posed the question of truth in history). Whether the historian is of the academic variety or an amateur or an historian cum detective, all of these issues come into play in the fiction and fi lm of the past century. What emerges from this survey is a persistent pattern that is not very flattering to historians and their profession. Almost universally, from inside and outside the academy, historians are lampooned and perceived in a most unflattering manner. They are portrayed as narcissistic, inept, lacking collective responsibility, frequently failing the tests of intellectual honesty and dedication and with a private life that is messy and full of emotional brutality. Although it could be argued that this may tell us more about the views of the authors than it does about society’s attitudes towards historians, these characteristics are evident across several cultures. It is hoped that this piece has elucidated these issues. One would welcome more historian protagonists in fiction and fi lm (and more research on the representation of this figure) in the future and (dare one hope) some more flattering portrayals than most of the historians and/or academics featured in this discussion.7 The largely negative representation of academics in general, and historians in particular, requires further discussion and explanation, especially in America where mass education has always been a national objective and perhaps even a national fetish. America has more than three thousand tertiary institutions, many more than any other Western country whether in absolute numbers or per capita. Its graduate schools always rank disproportionately high in international polls, and in some polls they rank forty out of the top fi fty in the world. Why then do fiction and fi lm offer such a negative representation of educators from within and outside the academy? Do Americans value education and not educators? The English authors appear to have even more negative views of academics, but English culture in the modern era has always placed a high value on education, at least for the intellectuals, the ruling elite and the political classes. But the campus literature written by authors like Lodge, Bradbury and Amis, all most prominent members of the English literary and academic establishment, promotes some extraordinarily jaundiced views of academic life. At the very least, these novels are evidence of either ambivalence among the intellectual classes toward their

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chosen professions or a kind of bizarre self-hatred. Perhaps it is all in jest and ironic (or even a group of former students taking revenge on one or more of their less-favoured lecturers in a past history class[es]), but taken as a totality, one thinks not. One might conclude, from the examples investigated in this chapter, that a persistent and transcendent suspicion exists in British and American culture, indeed across Western culture, that academics are not to be trusted and that they do not appear to be terribly dedicated to their work or reliable in social relationships. Thus there appears to be a disjuncture between what historians (and academics) actually do and how they are portrayed. For most historians in the academy, their work is deadly serious and increasingly at the core of public debate throughout the world in contested national narratives of most nation-states. In the US, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, India, Russia, South Africa and Turkey, to name a few, there are national debates on such divisive topics as the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima (US), the nature of the welfare state (Britain), the character of the Vichy period in World War II (France), the treatment of aboriginal peoples (Australia and New Zealand), the legacy of Stalin (Russia), the relationships between black and white (South Africa), relations with Muslims and the nature of the Muslim state (India and Turkey, and in the latter on the genocide in Armenia in World War I) in which historians are the central arbiters of debates that directly impinge on the political systems and stability in those societies.8 Some of these debates have taken on worldwide dimensions, such as the Holocaust-denier debate and the confl icting historical and territorial claims of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and Palestinians and Jews in Israel and Palestine. This survey of historians in fiction and film, therefore, presents us with a conundrum. There is a disjunction between the realities of academic work and how it is presented in the public media. This discrepancy is certainly worth exploring further, as the work of historians regarding contentious and potentially explosive issues around the globe continues to be in the public eye. In the fiction and fi lms examined in this chapter, historians and academics are depicted as solipsistic, grasping, shallow and untrustworthy careerists. Is there a corrective forthcoming from novelists, playwrights and fi lm makers? Over the past two decades, the use and misuse of history have preoccupied both those who write history and those who use historical materials as novelists, fi lm producers, documentary makers, poets, playwrights, biographers, commentators and the political classes. History is a crucial commodity in any society, as George Orwell observed in 1984: ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’ The handling of historical data, therefore, must be done with meticulous care and integrity, for the consequences of bias and pushing and shoving the raw material of history into preconceived paradigms or objects of malicious intent can have a profound impact on the stability of a community or nation. Would it be too much to ask, as we have in this

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chapter, for the depiction of historians to adhere to the same standards as those of historical investigation? We would conclude that if the integrity of history is to be our guide, then the social and cultural portrayal of historians should conform to the same standards of truth as the writing and use of history itself. This should not be too much to expect, nor should it be a standard beyond those in the creative arts or media in their own brand of pursuing and communicating what they see as the truth about life and history.9

NOTES 1. For example, see Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge, Polity 1999); Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (New York, Picador 1998); and Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (Oxford, O.U.P. 2008) as a sample of a considerable body of literature critical of all aspects of postmodernism and its consequences for Western intellectuals, especially in the academy. The counterattack has also been fierce and generated more literature; for example, see Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter (Minneapolis, MN, Harvard University Press 2004). 2. Indeed, one should read Lodge himself on the topic: David Lodge, ‘Review of The History Man,’ Guardian, 12 January 2008. 3. In must be said in very strong terms that this is the very opposite of the author Malcolm Bradbury, whom this writer knows from personal experience was a most genial, entertaining and brilliant lecturer and teacher whose passing was much lamented throughout the English-speaking academic world. 4. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975) was the fi rst in a trilogy that includes Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988). They follow the careers of two protagonists, Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, who exchange jobs from their respective universities in America and England. 5. The popularity of crime fiction can be attributed to the fact that most crime novels are just about the right length to complete reading on most longdistance air fl ights, which has increased their sales around the globe, as any glance at airport bookshops packed with crime fiction will testify. 6. Bonnot’s de Palma is widely acclaimed to be as captivating a policeman protagonist as his more illustrious fictional and notoriously cantankerous colleagues in America, such as Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch on the LAPD, Ian Rankin’s John Rebus on the Edinburgh police force and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander of the Swedish police. 7. It would appear that there is not much immediate hope in this regard, for in 2009, from the prolific and brilliant fi lm-makers and brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, came the fi lm A Serious Man, which tells the story of a mathematician struggling to gain tenure in a university and who has a Job-like array of problems. Again the academic is represented as a failure; he is an ineffectual, naïve cuckold, reiterating some of the themes running throughout this survey. 8. David Mosler is presently working on a book on this topic: Waging History Wars: Struggles for Intellectual Hegemony (proposed completion date 2011). 9. One is not especially sanguine about this in light of Ian McEwan’s latest novel Solar (2010) in which the protagonist is the vile and grotesque character, professor of physics Michael Beard, who is obese, a cuckold and adulterer, a

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REFERENCES Amis, K. 1953. Lucky Jim. London: Victor Gollancz. Bellow, S. 1964. Herzog. New York: Viking. Bradbury, M. 1975. The History Man. London: Secker and Warburg. Cather, W. 1925. The Professor’s House. London: Hamish Hamilton. Goddard, R. 1986. Past Caring. London: St Martin’s. . 2005. Sight Unseen. London: Bantam. Lodge, D. 1975. Changing Places. London: Secker and Warburg. Ridpath, M. 2001. The Predator. London: Penguin. Saramago, J. 2002. The Double. London: Harvill.

Contributors

Cătălina Botez is about to complete her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Constance, Germany. She completed research and studied at Yale University; the University of Sydney, Australia; and the University of Yassy, Romania. Her research interests lie primarily in trauma and identity studies, (post)memory, transnationalism, transculturality and migration, particularly as reflected in the recent literature of the aftermath published in Europe, Canada and Australia. She is also concerned with intertextual issues of child psychology conditioned by forced migration and intergenerational dialogues. Her current thesis explores the transnational topographies of trauma in literature, and the way post-Holocaust identity is moulded by exposure to the transcultural influences of the Diasporic experience in countries of immigration like Canada, England and Australia. Catalina Botez is the recipient of several research and travel grants, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, Brno Studies in English, European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire and Global Interdisciplinary Research Studies, in addition to chapters for several edited volumes by Routledge, Taylor and Francis, Presovska Univerzita (Slovakia), Universitätsverlag Winter, Inter-Disciplinary Press, Berghan Publishing and Leiden University Press. She has also coedited a transdisciplinary essay collection on Pluralism, Inclusion and Citizenship. Dr. Nicholas Brown is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia and in the School of History, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University. From 2002 to 2004 he was visiting professor of Australian history at University College Dublin. He was written on aspects of Australian social and environmental history, biography and international engagement. His previous books include Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in Australia in the 1950s (1995); Richard Downing: Economics, Advocacy and Social Reform (2001); and with Linda Cardinal, Managing Diversity: Practices of Citizenship in

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Contributors

National and Post-national Contexts—Ireland, Canada, Australia (2007). A biography of the Australian environmental activist Rick Farley, cowritten with Susan Boden, will be published in 2011. Dr. Jerome de Groot is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester. He is the author of The Historical Novel (2009), Consuming History (2008) and Royalist Identities (2004), as well as numerous articles on manuscript studies, historiography, popular history and early-modern court culture. Dr. Patricia Duncker is a professor of contemporary literature at the University of Manchester and is currently writing an experimental historical novel set in the 1870s. She is the author of five novels, Hallucinating Foucault (1996), winner of the McKitterick Prize and the Dillons First Fiction Award, James Miranda Barry (1999) and The Deadly Space Between (2002). Her fourth novel, Miss Webster and Chérif (2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize. She has published two collections of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (1997), shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Seven Tales of Sex and Death (2003), both of which have been widely translated. Her critical work includes a collection of essays on writing, theory and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall (2002). Her fifth novel, The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge, was shortlisted for the CWA Golden Dagger Award for the Best Crime Novel of the Year. Dr. Juanita Feros Ruys is an ARC QEII Senior Research Fellow and associate director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney, and a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions. Her PhD studied readings of the twelfth-century abbess Heloise in twentiethcentury scholarship and fiction. She has published on rhetorical strategies in the writings of Heloise and Abelard and on the historical reception of Heloise and other medieval women writers of Latin. Her coedited volume, Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, dealt with questions of integrity and empathy in the engagement between medieval women and the scholars who study them. She is editor of What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, and coeditor of Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period and The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom (forthcoming). She is also currently pursuing a number of fiction-writing projects for both adult and young adult readers. Angela Franks, as an historian and teacher, became aware of how oral history humanizes and illuminates the past through her work in the classroom, community involvement and research for books in the

Contributors 207 Yesterday’s Nottinghamshire series. This was the inspiration for two oral history books featuring the residents of Nottinghamshire. She is currently working on another oral history project. Dr. Tony Gibbons gained his LLB at the University of Adelaide, his Masters at Manchester University and his PhD at Flinders University. He is a Research Fellow at Flinders University. He is the author of On Refl ection (2004); Refl ection, Science and the Virtues (2009); and coeditor of The Process of Research in Education (2009) and a number of papers in the field of philosophy. Associate professor Rick Hosking teaches in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University. He has taught courses in historical fiction for many years and is currently supervising a number of creative writing-research higher-degree students who are writing historical novels. He is particularly interested in Australian historical fictions either from or representing the colonial period. Dr. David Mosler was born in the United States in 1941 and educated at Georgetown and Stanford universities where he gained an MA in history at the former and a BA and PhD in history at the latter. He emigrated to Australia in 1971 and has taught American, European and British history in Australian universities. Currently he is a visiting research fellow in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. His most recent books explore the nature of Australian nationality in Australia, the Recreational Society (2002) and US global policy in The American Challenge: The World Resists US Liberalism (2007). He is presently working on a manuscript for a book titled ‘Waging History Wars: The Struggles for Intellectual Hegemony,’ which explores the worldwide battles for competing national narratives including the ‘black armband’ debate in Australia and numerous similar debates across the world. Jessica Murrell is a postgraduate researcher in the discipline of English at the University of Adelaide, where she teaches film studies. She recently completed her doctoral thesis, which examines the representation of character and subjectivity in the ‘indie/alternative’ Indiewood film. Her research interests are in the theory and history of fi lm, with a particular focus on the Hollywood cinema of the late twentieth and early twentyfi rst centuries. María Reimóndez is a feminist translator, scholar, writer and activist and has worked as professional translator/interpreter for more than eleven years. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation, ‘Translation of Feminist and Postcolonial Texts: An Empiric Approach to Ideology.’ As a scholar, she has published extensively on literary criticism, especially

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in the Galician context, and the relationship between gender and the nation. She is the coauthor with Olga Castro of the book Feminismos, a wide overview of feminist theories all over the globe. She is a member of the research group Feminario de Investigación Feminismos e Resistencias at the University of Vigo. Her published fiction includes Moda Galega (2002), Caderno de Bitácora (2004), Usha (2006), O club da calceta (2006) and Pirata (2009). Her novel O club da calceta (The knitting club) has been translated into Spanish and Italian, as well as adapted as both a theatrical piece and a film (2009). Dr. Emily Sutherland is a Honorary Research Fellow at Flinders University, South Australia, where she completed her PhD and taught in the Department of Humanities. Her special research focus is historical novels and, in particular, the depiction of historical characters in works of fiction. She is also a published novelist and poet. Her latest novel is The Paraclete Conundrum (2010), which depicts an imaginary meeting between Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Index

A Aberth, John, 148 accuracy, 15, 18, 22, 78, 82, 83, 133, 142, 148, 151 Ackroyd, Peter, 77–78 Albee, Edward,198 Amis, Kingsley, 189–192, 193 Antonello, Pierpaolo, 31, 32, 36, 42 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 167 Aristotle, 29, 33, 39, 41, 44, 71 authenticity 13–16, 18–20, 24, 108– 110, 113–116, 118, 120, 123, 125, 127, 133, 136, 143, 144, 146, 151, 153, 158, 164, 183 Ayer, A. J., 8

B Bachelard, Gaston, 32, 39, 42, 44 Baker, M.,184 Bazán, Emilia Pardo,183 Bellow, Saul, 195–196 Benn, Stanley, 71 Berlant, Laurent, 109, 118 Bezace, Didier, 163 Blackett, M., 153 Botelho, Keith, 72 Bradbury, Malcolm, 190–192, 194, 201 Brien, Donna Lee, 72–74 Burgess, Melvin, 16 Byatt, A. S., 196, 197

children’s fiction, 16–19 Chion, Michel, 181–182 Clendinnen, Inga, 87, 88, 90 Comte-Sponville, Andre, 4, 70, 71 Connolly, Lynne, 15, 24 Cox, D., 3 Crisp, Roger, 33 Cromwell, Thomas, 61–64, 74–76, 78–80, 83

D Darren, Alison, 180 Davis, Jack, 141 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 151 de Gabriel, Narciso, 168–170 de Groot, 20, 63, 82, 183 defamation, 65–66, 68, 71 democratization, 109, 112, 115, 116, 118, 123–125, 128 Derrida, Jacques, 29, 30 Deutsch, Harry, 67 di Caro, Roberto, 32 Doherty, Berlie, 16 Donaghue, Emma, 83 Dunant, Sarah, 63 Duncan, Ronald, 159–162

E Enright, Nick, 72–73 ethnic minorities, 17

C

F

Cameron, Jenny, 117 Carballeira, Helena Miguelez, 178 Carter, Paul, 90, 119–121 Cather, 200, 205, 215 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 108–110, 115–116, 118, 125 Chandler M.J., 12

Faderman, Lilian, 176–177 feminism, 170, 175, 179 feminist, 18, 54, 58, 154, 159, 168, 170, 172, 174–176, 178–180, 184 Field, R. W. 15 Fisk, Alan, 15

210 Index Forrester, James, 13 Forsythe, James, 154 fortitude, 4, 5, 7, 11, 70 Franklin, Ariana, 84

G Gibson, Katherine, 117 Glover, Dennis, 80 Goddard, Robert, 192–194, 196, 198, 201 Grenville, Kate, 84, 87–89, 97, 103, Secret River the, 85–89, 97 Guy, John, 76, 79

H Haasse, Hella, 50, 55–60 Een Nieuwer Testament, 50 Harwood, R., 169 Heidegger, Martin, 30, 44 Hicks, Susan, 15 Hirsch, E. D., 75 Holliday S., 12 honour, 71, 72, 79, 82, 163, 174 Hunt, Kathy, 83 Hutcheon, Linda, 175

MacRae, J., 20 Mantel, Hilary, 25–26, 61–63, 74–84, Wolf Hall, 61, 74, 76, 77, 79–81, 83–84 Margaronis, Maria, 148, 149 Martin, S., 43 Marx, Karl, 29, 30, 35, 44, 59, 183, 187, 190, 196 McClellan, Andrew, 147, 149 McEwan, Ian, 14, 20–25, Atonement, 14, 20, 21, 24 memory, 29–31, 34–36, 41, 44, 56–59, 62, 85, 87–89, 96–97 Middleton, Peter, 25 Millar, Ronald, 153–158 Moorhen, Wendy E. A., 81, 82 More, Thomas, 61, 63, 74–84

N Nabal, Eduardo, 180, 182 Newland, Simpson, Paving the Way: A Romance of the Australian Bush, 86 Nield, Jonathan, 13

I

O

interdependence, 3–7, 116

Oram, Alison, 171, 176 Ovid, 72

J Jakobson, Roman, 68 justice, 1, 4, 5, 11, 33, 38, 65, 69–71, 74, 79, 81–84, 100, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116, 127, 142

K Kaplan, Ann, 179

L LaCapra, Dominick, 35 Laclau, Ernesto, 35 Lambdin, Dewey, 69 Langer, Lawrence 28 Lawson, Henry, 87 Leeston, O., 18 Lenin, 53, 79 Levi Primo, Il sistema periodico, 27, 33, 39 Lingard, Joan, 19 Lodge, David, 190–192, 194, 201

M Macdonald Fraser, George, 2, 7, 77, 78 Macherey, 53 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 3–5, 7, 9

P Bazán, Emilia Pardo, 170, 172, 179 Peck, J., 109, 114, 120, 125 Peel, Mark, 109–118, 121–124, 128–129 Peters, Richard Stanley, 71 Plato, 29, 31 prudence, 5, 7, 11, 70 Pusey, Michael, 112, 117, 118, 120 Pynchon, Thomas, 21

R Radice, B., 150, 152, 158, 161–163 Read, Peter, 109–111, 124–129 Ridpath, Michael, 192, 194, 196, 198 Rosenstone, Robert A., 151 Ruys, Juanita Feros, 146, 149, 150, 161

S Sánchez-Escalonilla, A., 181, Saramago, Jose, 191, 195–197 Scott, Joan Wallach, 175, Scott, Walter Sir, 13, 48, 55, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 102 screenwriter, 148, 162, 169

Index Selden, Raman, 68 Sinclair, Paul, 119 Singwiththespirit, 15 Sinnett, Frederick, 93, 97 Socrates, 8, 9, 49 Somerville, Margaret, 109–111, 118, 120–124, 128, 129 Spivak, Gayagtri C., 167, 185 Stendahl, Henri Beyle, 12, Stiegler, Bernard, 29–31, 41 subaltern, 97, 107, 118, 167, 168, 174, 175, 183, 184, 185 Sweeney, C., 12

T Tahourdin, Peter, 155, 156, 158, 163 Taylor, Christopher, 79 Taylor, Debbie, 60 Taylor, Elizabeth, 187, 198 Thomasson, Amie, 66–68 Thornham, Sue, 179 Tolstoy, Leo 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, War and Peace, 47, 50, 53, 54 Trease, Geoffrey, 17–19

211

Troyat, H., 53 Turnbull, Annmarie, 171, 176 Twain, Mark, 162

V Van Engen, John, 152, 155 Villarejo, Amy, 168, 176 virtues, 1–7, 11–12, 33, 39, 41, 42, 44, 70

W Waddell, Helen, 153 Wagner, E., 21 Waters, Sarah, 14, 17 Westall Robert, 16–19 Machine-Gunners, the, 16, 19 Wheeler, Bonnie, 158 Whitlock, Gillian, 108, 125 Wilson, Lynnet, 18 Wilson, R., 37 wisdom, 11, 12, 33, 39, 44, 103, 154 Woodham-Smith, Cecil, 10 Woods, Tim, 25 Woods, William F. 154