The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century

To write a historical novel is to enter a no-man’s land on the borders of fact and fantasy. All fiction is written on this territory, but when the work explicitly engages with historical events – when it is part of the writer’s project to reimagine them – the ground becomes a minefield of hard questions. What responsibility does a novelist have to the historical record? How much – and what kinds of things – is it permissible to invent? For the purposes of fiction, what counts as evidence? 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? Can imaginative language discover truths about the past that are unavailable to more discursive writing?

The last few decades have seen an outpouring of novels in English set in times of war or violence, many of them by writers born after 1945 who have themselves lived through a long period of peace. There are many personal reasons why someone might choose to relive the violence and suffering experienced by earlier generations, but there are also more public explanations. Our culture has an enormous appetite for imagined violence and extreme emotions; war-time fiction sells. The Hungarian marxist critic Georg Lukács, writing about the historical novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, argued that the hunger for this kind of vicarious intensity is a symptom of our disconnection from historical forces: ‘It is precisely the longing to escape from the triviality of modern bourgeois life which produces these historical themes. One of the most important means of producing . . . pseudo-monumentality is the emphasis on brutality.’¹ His social analysis, though, ignores the long history of our fascination with violence. In Regarding the Pain of Others, her essay about our responses to images of horror, Susan Sontag traces the acknowledgment of our ‘innate tropism towards the gruesome’, ‘the attraction of mutilated bodies’,² back through Georges Bataille, William Hazlitt and Edmund Burke as far as Plato’s Republic, where Socrates tells a story about a man overcome by his desire to look at the bodies of executed criminals: ‘Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, “There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight”.’³

To write a novel set in time of war or political brutality is necessarily to confront one’s own susceptibility to the allure of violence, as well as questions of authenticity, exploitation and responsibility. Since the second half of the twentieth century the task has taken on a new complexity. A writer who now tries to imagine public events she did not experience is placing herself at the confluence of two strong, sometimes conflicting currents. The first is the stream of modernism and post-modernism, with its recognition that all experience is subjective and every narrative necessarily partial: it is no longer possible to write serious historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, who implicitly offered an omniscient, authoritative view based on extensive research. The second current flows from the idea that the worst historical crimes of the twentieth century (especially the Nazi genocide of the Jews and Stalin’s gulag) are literally unspeakable, and that only those who lived through them – only a Primo Levi or a Nadezhda Mandelstam – have a right to break the silence.

Perhaps the best-known expression of that belief is Elie Wiesel’s argument, in a 1977 talk which formulated the concept of a ‘literature of testimony’, that the experience of the Holocaust is beyond literature: ‘A novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka. A novel about Majdanek is about blasphemy. Is blasphemy. . . . He or she who did not live through the event will never know it. And he or she who did live through the event will never reveal it.’⁴ Even – perhaps especially – for those who lived through terrible atrocities, the need to speak is always hedged with guilt and inadequacy. In his last book, The Drowned and the Saved...