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Chapter 2 - preface

Few intellectual developments in the last two hundred years have af-

fected us more profoundly than the enriched sense of historicity

which emerged in the late eighteenth century. In various ways, this

historical sense informs the works of Herder, Ranke, and Marx-and

the novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Scott. Though we may attempt to

repudiate it, it is constitutive of our intellectual and moral worlds.

Given such a situation, one might expect the historical novel to have

attained a privileged place in the ranks of literature. Instead, the form

suffers from neglect, even contempt.

This book proceeds from the conviction that the historical novel de-

serves a closer, more reasoned appraisal than it usually receives. His-

torical fiction merits such attention for a number of reasons, which

include but transcend simple critical justice and the possibility of dis-

covering new sources of esthetic pleasure. The problems historical

novels have with history and we have with historical novels are po-

tentially instructive. They can help to reveal limits in the esthetic

forms we most prize-knowledge that matters for those who employ

imaginative forms to make sense of the world. A clearer understand-

ing of the workings of historical fiction can also clarify certain aspects

of the nature of history itself, and of our situations as historical be-

mgs.

In all these areas, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the first and ar-

guably the greatest historical novelist in the modern sense, are exem-

plary, and they therefore have special prominence in this book. Scott's

works are exemplary, first of all, in being neglected. Despite some

stirrings of a Scott revival in recent years, the Waverley Novels re-

main the least-appreciated and least-read body of major fiction in

English. For anyone who admires historical fiction, this situation

stands as an affront and a challenge. But the current neglect of Scott

also raises questions that transcend the history of taste. Is there some-

thing about his novels themselves, or about nineteenth-century histor-

ical fiction in general, which resists our favored modes of analysis? Is

the relationship between Scott and the larger traditions of the novel

more problematical than it may appear to be? Is critical suspicion of

Scott to some extent justified, and if so, on what grounds? This book

responds to these questions and others like them. By discriminating

between different roles history can play in historical novels, it seeks to

present a fruitful approach to Scott's novels and to nineteenth-century

historical fiction in general.

This approach departs in certain ways from those employed, often

to good effect, by others who have attempted to lift the historical

novel from its present obscurity. The most significant attempt in this

century to reassert the importance of historical fiction and of Scott

did so by exploring the process by which history comes to human

consciousness in art. If something of a Scott revival is afoot in the

English-speaking world, this must in part be attributed to the transla-

tion of Georg Lukacs's The Historical Novel in 1 962. Lukacs values

Scott precisely because he embodies a critical moment in the develop-

ment of our knowledge of history. Lukacs has shed much light on

Scott and on historical fiction generally, and I am greatly indebted to

him. But the strength of his approach is also its weakness. His story

of the development of historical consciousness finds its climax, not in

the creation of increasingly rich historical novels, but in the emer-

gence of works that can register the present as history. For Lukacs's

own purposes, this procedure is entirely justified and yields impressive

results. But by shifting the focus away from historical fiction as a phe-

nomenon in its own right, his developmental vision unavoidably re-

duces Scott in particular, and historical fiction in general, to the status

of forerunners. It invites us to think of Scott perhaps as a John the

Baptist, more likely as a pigmy on whose shoulders giants stand, and

then to look beyond him.

Lukacs has provided what is likely to be the definitive historical

study of historical fiction. I treat historical fiction in terms that are

primarily synchronic. I concentrate on the representational possibili-

ties and limitations of historical fiction, as exemplified by Scott's nov-

els as well as by certain other works in the European realist tradition.

Such an approach is appropriate to nineteenth-century historical nov-

els, because (as I indicate in my first chapter) they lack an indepen-

dent history of their own. In larger terms, a dialectical tension be-

tween the syn chronic and the diachronic is part of historicism itself,

for historicism can lead to visions of emerging historical process like

Hegel's, but it can also promote an appreciation of systematic cultural

uniqueness and irreducible historical difference.

A synchronic treatment of Scott's novels is also a less paradoxical

enterprise than it might seem. When he began writing novels Scott

was in his forties and fully formed as a thinker and an artist. He pro-

duced good and bad novels throughout his career, and only with dis-

tortion can his works be made to fit a developmental pattern. My dis-

cussion reveals two moments when he engaged in significant though

short-lived departures from his normal fictional practices, first by us-

ing his fiction primarily to explore contemporary concerns and later

by making his protagonist the true center of two novels. These mo-

ments are unusual: except for the decline in his final works, such

trends as exist in his career as a novelist are best explained on

grounds other than personal growth or artistic development.

In my discussion of Scott, I have felt compelled to disagree with ef-

forts to show that history is not his ultimate concern, or to assimilate

his works too directly to the norms of the novelists who followed

him. If Scott is really trying to do the same things in the same ways as

his successors, he does them much less well and deserves obscurity. It

is also important not to defend Scott by concentrating on a favored

kind of Waverley Novel and forgetting that he created a number of

different kinds of historical fiction. To be sure, certain Waverley Nov-

els are better left in oblivion. But much of Scott's greatness lies in his

variety. One of my objects has been to promote an awareness of this

variety by describing in a systematic way the different kinds of novel-

istic structure in which it is embodied.

A discussion of historical fiction quickly extends into areas of

daunting complexity and importance. I have tried to strike a balance

between giving such issues the attention they deserve and producing a

study focused on a manageable subject. Thus I deal in some detail

with certain aspects of Lukacs, but avoid the controversies that have

swirled around his name and methods, particularly since his death.

Lukacs always appeared to have something to tell us about nine-

teenth-century realism, and the time may come when, instead of dis-

missing his attack on modernism by calling him a Stalinist or fetishist

or closet bourgeois, we will respond to the moral challenge it pre-

sents, for all its shortcomings. I also avoid discussing the representa-

tion of history in novels set in the recent past or the present. I believe

that the representational problems that shape historical fiction touch

such works as well, but in ways complex enough to demand a much

longer discussion than I can here provide. Finally, I discuss only cer-

tain aspects of the problem of whether history (or anything else) can

be represented in fiction, and indeed of whether history can be known

or experienced at all. Questions of historical epistemology and of the

means by which the readerly texture of a novel can create a "history-

effect" have considerable interest. They have already begun to be ex-

plored with fruitful results in studies of historical fiction and of

Scott.' My focus lies elsewhere.

Depending on one's metaphysical presuppositions, stories about

history may seem potentially true or false, or they may seem a set of

essentially arbitrary constructs, reflecting the present if they reflect

anything at all. Yet the works themselves remain. Charles Altieri has

noted that " for the agents involved in particular practices, metaphysi-

cal standards of arbitrariness are irrelevant. "2 If this book promotes a

sharper awareness of the "particular practices" embodied in Scott's

novels, and of the problems and possibilities that Scott and his succes-

sors faced in their attempts to give history fictional form, it will have

achieved its primary goal.

Despite the subject of my book, I shall not attempt a history of in-

fluences on its progress from the past to the present, but shall simply

1. See, for instance, Richard Waswo, "Story as Historiography in the Waverley

Novels," ELH, 47 (1 980), 3 04-3 0. After I had completed the present book, I had the

pleasure of hearing Waswo deliver a rousing talk entitled "Scott and the Really Great

Tradition" at the Aberdeen Scott Conference held in the summer of 1982, in which he

attacked much the same set of critical presuppositions that I question in my first

chapter.

2. Charles Altieri, "Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer, "

Critical Inquiry, 6 ( 1 979 ), 35 1.

chronicle some debts. My debt to certain books, above all to the

works of Georg Lukacs, should be obvious enough, especially since I

offer the tribute of vigorous disagreement to many of those whose

writings have set the terms for present-day discussions of the subjects

I treat. Debts to persons, though less obvious, are not less real. Early

help came from Basil Guy, John Henry Raleigh, Ian Campbell, Mar-

tin Jay, and from Ralph Rader, generous in agreement and disagree-

ment, the finest teacher I have known. More recently, Jean Blackall,

Fredric Bogel, Jonathan Culler, Edgar Rosenberg, Daniel Schwarz,

and Cushing Strout read and commented upon various parts of my

manuscript, and my students at Cornell stimulated and challenged me

as we tried to make sense of historical fiction.

During the early stages of this project, I was fortunate enough to

spend a year in Edinburgh, where I was supported by a Fulbright-

Hays Scholarship and a Traveling Fellowship from the University of

California. Completion of the book was aided by grants from Cornell

University. I appreciate this support. I also thank the editors of Stud-

ies in the Novel for allowing me to use in my discussion of The Bride

of Lammermoor material that originally appeared in their pages. John

Ackerman and Bernhard Kendler of Cornell University Press are

model editors, and I appreciate their assistance. Finally, I acknowl-

edge with pleasure a special debt to Walter Cohen and Laura Brown,

who read and commented upon every page of this book save one, and

who persuaded me to conclude.