James, Cather, Vollmann, and the Distinction of Historical Fiction

One: The Ivory Tower

The field of English studies has become used to celebrating, for more than a decade, the importance of border-lines and in-between conditions. “A contingent, borderline experience opens up in-between colonizer and colonized. This is a space of cultural and interpretive undecidability produced in the ‘present’ of the colonial moment”: the gist of that sentence of Homi Bhabha’s (206) has established itself as a critical commonplace. And not only the present of the colonial moment confers border-line experience: whether understood as history’s present, or as fiction’s present, or as plain “now,” temporality confers a border-line experience on us all. Every passing moment solicits comprehension of our immersion in an in-between element. Saturated as we are by attention to in-betweenness, however, when a topos prevails as much as the borderline-borderlands has, one might be excused for wanting to hear something new about it, even something of a challenge to it. There is a considerable challenge in Dorrit Cohn’s recent book The Distinction of Fiction (1999). Arriving in the form of a contribution to narratology, and without intending to address post-colonial poetics or any undecidable aspect of present-ness, The Distinction of Fiction emphatically reverses the celebration of border-lines. It intends not to undo borders, not to find them undecidable, and not to find them nefarious. Cohn wants to re-establish impermeable aspects of borders. The territory whose borders she wants even in some ways to seal is fiction’s; and she wants especially to limit border-crossings between historical narrative and fictional narrative. So much for mutually porous relations between fiction and the historical present! Drawing inspiration from the modernist historical novelist Alfred Döblin’s insistence that “the historical novel is, in the first place, a novel; in the second place, it isn’t history,” Cohn claims that there is a “great divide” (162) between fiction’s territory and history’s. The claim, inasmuch as Cohn formidably defends it, might give us pause. If the distinction of fiction inheres in fiction’s resistance to history—either to history’s past moments or to its present ones as historical narrative makes them available to us—we cannot continue to mingle historical and aesthetic concerns as unqualifiedly as we have in the last generation of scholarship. And if we respect the claims of Cohn’s argument, we will be reminded that our deconstructive inheritance, of which border-line thinking is an offshoot, never intended us to get rid of divisions and distinctions, but to struggle with them no less than with their in-betweens.

What might such struggle mean for fiction’s present, for a “now” whose quicksilver character appears perennially to have nurtured novelistic inspiration? Surely a discursive capture of the present’s in-betweenness might qualify for what Cohn calls “signposts of fictionality” (109–31). But for Cohn fictionality’s signposts do not depend on in-betweenness. She sees fiction as a discourse defined and constituted by its limitary difference from another, contrastive discourse: history. With historical narrative as her constant foil, Cohn identifies fiction with freedom. “The process that transforms archival sources into narrative history,” she writes “is qualitatively different from the process that transforms a novelist’s sources into his fictional creation” (114). In fiction, the transformational process depends upon liberties taken by fiction with time and with knowledge—liberties that are precluded in the non-fictive realm of historical discourse. Fiction’s way of taking liberties with historical discourse is fiction’s freedom from history, even from history’s present moment. When Cohn asserts that “artful perturbations of . . . temporal structure show fictionality” (116), one only need think for confirmation of how the writing of history has yet to set as a standard for itself the temporal perturbations of Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). Fiction’s juggling with time is a compelling mark of a stubborn difference between itself and non-fiction. Even more compelling, in fiction “the minds of imaginary figures can be known in ways that those of real persons cannot” (118...