Is a "historical" novel supposed to be well-researched?

On Moshfegh, Mantel, and Marra, and the role of the historical novel in society

A while ago a friend of mine (it was Discordia’s own Sire) recommended me Ottessa Moshfegh’s McGlue in an attempt to sway me to her after I’d expressed dissatisfaction with her other work.¹ I gave it a chance and enjoyed it (a bit too “MFA” for me overall but I enjoyed it), I thought the narrative voice was very fun, and it was interesting to take one of Moshfegh’s typical messy bitch characters and make her a 19th-century alcoholic sailor man.² One thing I kept noticing, though, was Moshfegh’s constant and glaring historical inaccuracies—and not even very small ones, I mean pretty huge ones. For instance: McGlue’s lawyer at one point is talking about “the Republicans.” One problem: the book takes place in 1851. Most people with a basic understanding of American history will be aware that the Republican Party did not exist until 1854 after the Kansas-Nebraska Act; that’s pretty vital to their story—this is high school history class stuff. Another: McGlue uses the word “faggot” a ton, something a lot of readers would probably read askew, because it immediately doesn’t sound like then-contemporary diction—and if said readers were to do even a cursory Google search they would discover that, no, obviously “faggot” was not a slur that was used in the 1850s; in fact, it’s about a century too early for such usage. This was far from the sort of historical precision often fetishized in landmark texts of the genre such as Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. It seemed to reflect a writer who wasn’t all that interested in history in the first place, and one so clearly lacking an ear for the diction that it suggested she didn’t read much literature or documentation from the era either.

Here’s the thing: I found I didn’t really give a shit.

I mean, I was shocked to learn that somehow McGlue was actually the result of archival research—as someone who has worked a job as an archival researcher myself you’d think I’d guffaw and slam the book in the bin out of sheer pride in the nobility of my former calling… but I didn’t. That itself shocked me too, because I’m nothing if not a lifelong pedant, like my father and his father before me.³ I have written about “historicity” and anachronism in literature before, namely in diction in translation, such as how we often resort to and accept ye olde “thy/thou” language when we translate Beowulf in spite of the fact that such language is centuries off the mark. But this time it had me wondering about something more specific: what does it mean to translate history into the present? Is it necessary for a “historical” novel to be “historically” accurate? And furthermore, does a “historical” novel fail if it isn’t?

What was it like to live in Tudor England? Why not read Hilary Mantel? Well, Mantel can conduct as much research as she likes,⁴ but it will never be enough to bestow upon us a sort of generational mentalité or access to the “spirit of the age,” you could say, to understand that experience; indeed, such a mentalité, that is to say the mentalité of one who has lived in Tudor England, are now fundamentally extinct. ‘Tis the attempted replication of these mentalités that makes for the “fiction” and distinguishes Mantel’s Wolf Hall from just being a biography of Thomas Cromwell. But the expectations of the genre often make it so that the content of our understanding of history is coloured by these depictions—our expectations of Mantel the “historian,” Mantel the “researcher,” can convince us that we have had a genuine metempsychotic exchange with Cromwell via Mantel as medium, that thorough-enough research might be sufficient for her to reconstruct a dead man’s interiority with complete accuracy. Is this her actual intention? Well… no, obviously. But it is effectively how we are taught to read historical fiction. Mantel’s work is famous for its historical accuracy, but it is also deeply psychologically-interpretive of its subjects, and this draws on our contemporary psyche to flesh itself out, that can’t really be helped.

I’m not someone who has much sympathy for royals, but one of their number I’ve always felt a great degree of sympathy for, against my better judgment, is Elizabeth I. What’s not to pity? Her first memories included the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn, at the orders of her father, and she was declared illegitimate. After the death of her father she went to live with Baron Thomas Seymour (her widowed stepmother’s second husband) as her guardian, who routinely molested her, and after her stepmother’s death tried to coerce her into marrying him until he was beheaded for being a schemer. Her brutal half-sister then proceeded to persecute Elizabeth’s religious faith, and, although she probably had nothing to do with it, an attempt to overthrow Queen Mary and install Elizabeth failed and led to Elizabeth being thrown in the Tower of London where she was nearly executed. Elizabeth was an intellectual, a poet, and an avid translator from a young age who produced her own variations of Plutarch and Cicero. She never really wanted to be queen, but after her sister died she had little choice in the matter, and, though she had been locked up by her Catholic sister, was nevertheless far more tolerant of religious difference than her. She had to face the threat of invasion by the largest navy in the world via the Spanish Armada, not to mention plenty of attempts to depose her, and a cult grew around a very perverse obsession surrounding her “virginity” that likely took its toll on her mental health. She may have died of blood poisoning brought on by her reliance on lead-based makeup to cover up her excessive smallpox scars.

Here’s the thing: that stuff about Elizabeth I not wanting to be Queen? I made it up. It’s how I’ve internalized the story of Elizabeth, it fills in some of the gaps in a narratively satisfying way. My sympathetic portrayal of the queen is steeped in fantasy. It’s very possible the obsession over her virginity really didn’t impact Elizabeth much—she grew up in a society with very different values than ours after all, I’m just projecting contemporary ideas onto someone who has been dead for over four hundred years. And there’s a lot that isn’t so sympathetic about Lizzy. So much, in fact, that, despite my sympathetic reading of her biography, it’s pretty clear that she was not a sympathetic figure at all. To call her “tolerant” is a bit of a stretch because, while she may have been less harsh than her forebears, recusancy was still a crime. She continued the brutal practice of drawing and quartering dissidents—which, for those scoring at home, involved strangling the victim until nearly dead; keeping them alive as they were disemboweled and had their genitals cut off; burning their organs and genitals before their still-living eyes; before finally beheading them and chopping their remains into four pieces. She was the beneficiary and upholder of a social system that kept countless people in miserable poverty, sold slaves (Admiral John Hawkins even used the queen’s personal ship to transport some of them), and oversaw the beginnings of England’s colonial age. The woman I have painted here is a selective fiction, a fanfiction even, a character rendered sympathetic through psychological-identification and the projection of anachronistic values that exclude unsympathetic context. So what if Lizzy had a lousy time? Does it trump the suffering of the nameless and faceless masses that languished under her heel? We can’t help that we naturally make fictions out of facts. We can’t help that we tell ourselves stories about history. Historical fiction may guide the fictions of history in our minds—sometimes this is benign, but sometimes “historical fiction” can be employed to reinforce ideologically-loaded, propagandistic visions of the past.

The expectation that “historical fiction” should be accurate often leads to the idea that it plainly is accurate. I once had an argument with someone at a friend’s cottage about the practice of airbrushing individuals out of photographs in the Soviet Union, something this guy seemed to believe happened with relative frequency, while I tried to explain to him that such practices were entirely reserved for images featuring high-profile purged political figures in specific photos, not just some sort of general damnatio memoriae practice extending to all photographs in order to deny their sheer existence. The man across from me seemed unshakable in his conviction that this wasn’t the case, arms-crossed, to the point that I started to wonder whether I, in spite of my armoury of facts, was mistaken. So I asked him where he got this idea. It was in the novel The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra.

The Tsar of Love and Techno is a work of sentimental drek, but, more dangerously, it is also a work of serious historical revisionism, which evades the hazardous standards of factual accuracy by “being fiction.” In the first section of Marra’s interconnected-short-story collection, a Soviet censor works tirelessly, day-in and day-out, correcting photographs to excise enemies of the state, including… a photo of a fucking ballerina? For what purpose? The process of modifying these photos was very labour-intensive and usually began with the photo’s negative (if available). Modifying already printed photos—like the one the character works on—occurred in rarer cases, but was even more difficult. Usually if you were going to do something like that it would be to remove someone who had become a political persona non grata (Trotsky, say) from widely-circulated photos whose propagandistic potential would otherwise be compromised by the awkward presence of a current enemy of the state standing next to Comrade Stalin. But a random ballerina?

It’s been a while, so I picked the book up while writing this to get something straight. Note that neither the censor in this scene nor the man who gives him the photo have any idea who this woman is:

“Who is this?”

Maxim shrugs. The woman is no one. That we have been given her photograph is proof enough that she no longer dances.

THEN WHY THE FUCK WOULD SHE NEED TO BE ERASED, TONY??? WHY WOULD SOMEONE WHO THESE PEOPLE DON’T EVEN RECOGNIZE BE SOMEONE WHO WOULD HAVE TO BE ERASED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS, TONY??? WHY THE FUCK WOULD THE STATE SPEND ALL THAT TIME AND THOSE RESOURCES REMOVING A RANDOM FUCKING WOMAN FROM A RANDOM FUCKING PHOTO THAT PROBABLY ISN’T EVEN ALL THAT WIDELY CIRCULATED??? TONY??????

I never read much further than the first story in Marra’s book because I had very little interest in doing so. Quite ironically, this ludicrous rewriting of history is just the sort of thing that Marra is fictionally depicting—a distortion of truth and history for the purposes of propaganda, in this case the ability of the “liberal” West to continue its attempt to pose its vanquished enemy as a dark shadow over the land and its people, who were begging to be freed (this is a subject I have written about extensively before).

To quote William Wallace in Braveheart: “not every man really lives.” Braveheart’s William Wallace, for instance, certainly did not ever live, because that film is gleefully historically empty and might as well be about Aragorn or Cloud Strife, and yet it has effectively become the primary source for most people’s understandings of Scottish history internationally. Do the writers of historical novels have the same responsibilities as journalists? Is it their duty to present the world and its history fairly and accurately in order to elucidate our understandings? Or would it perhaps behoove us to stop treating historical fiction in this way and make sure to emphasize its role as artifice?

OR READ ABOUT HOW IDEOLOGICAL DRIVES IN POETRY CAN BE USED TO DROP BOMBS ON PEOPLE!

1. “I haven’t cared much for anything else I’ve read by her, but McGlue is a banger.” —Ed. note (Sire)

2. That being said, this was her first book, so maybe the rest are all actually 19th-century alcoholic sailor men transposed into contemporary messy bitches?

3. My father and I once had to calm my grandfather down in a busy restaurant because he started loudly, angrily shouting about the historical inaccuracies in the film The Great Escape, namely that it centered the American POWs, who were in fact an insignificant part of the real historical event.

4. Or “could have” considering she’s dead.