Love: A Suspect Form, and: A Witch's Dictionary, and: National Anthem (review)

Aristotle famously claimed that the difference between the historian and the poet is that "the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be." Poetry, Aristotle continued, because it deals with universal matters rather than with particulars, was "more philosophic and of graver import" than history. Despite Aristotle's fondness for binaries like these, his system left little room for what we call historical fiction—or fictional history, which is not quite the same thing. The writer of historical fiction begins with the empirical record, to be sure, but her or his interest tends less toward some sort of strictly photorealistic record of the past than toward a version of how things might have been, of how the past appears when observed through the eyes and sensibilities of the age in which the work is composed. This is why I suggest that "fictional history" may be a better, fairer term than the more familiar "historical fiction." Certainly it seems more appropriate for the three books I shall consider here, each of which treats history in ways that interlace present-day sensibilities and preoccupations with what each author presents as an essentially historical framework.

Start with Judith Infante's Love: A Suspect Form, the latest among many retellings (including Alexander Pope's famous 1717 poem) of the history of Heloise and Abelard. Over the ground bass supplied by the factual history of the famous twelfth-century lovers, Infante weaves a contrapuntal polyphony that voices the thoughts and passions of the principal players in this tragic drama. Because the seemingly familiar tale is not always remembered correctly, Infante's brief prose introduction traces its outlines while explaining how and why she has been drawn to the subject. Abelard, the self-proclaimed "Philosopher of the World" at the new university at Paris, and Heloise, the brilliant and highly educated niece of a canon at Notre Dame, became clandestine lovers after he became her tutor. She gave birth to the son they named Astralabe, but bowing to the expectation that Catholic teachers be celibate, they kept their marriage a secret. When Abelard later sent Heloise back to the convent, probably to cover himself, her uncle read the move as abandonment and took his revenge by having him drugged and castrated. The lovers subsequently took Holy Orders and saw one another only occasionally; Heloise eventually became an abbess, despite her evident disinterest in the religious life; the monk Abelard rose to the status of abbot, but his philosophical doubts led him into conflicts with the Church that eventually resulted in two trials for heresy and banishment to an isolated monastery; Astralabe was turned over to Abelard's sister and vanished from the historical record.

Love: A Suspect Form consists, then, of the voices of Heloise and Abe-lard (primarily) extrapolated from the letters they exchanged for years after their separation, as well as the wholly invented voices of Astralabe (whose angry prose paragraphs reflect outcast status) and other contemporaries. Adding to the collection's rich intertextuality, each poem is preceded by quotations from Heloise's and Abelard's actual letters, from the Bible, and from the works of Ovid, whose work (widely studied in the medieval universities) provides the paradigm of metamorphosis and myth-making upon which Infante works her history-based variations. Abelard's poems reflect his uneasy posture between self-justification and self-pity:

I am severed from the One who burns me.(He wants no offering whose testicles are cutor bruised or torn). I am less than a healthy goat.

Yet she weeps. (Knowing I stand here in shadowto see her veiling?) Familiar with the classics,she addresses this wrong with a fitting quote— Noble husband, too great for me to wed …

("Abelard: Suspect Form," 70)

This is Abelard: learned philosopher who has Heloise quote the poet Lucan as she becomes a nun with lines...