Literature as History
February 16, 2017 § Leave a comment
I am reading Matthew Beaumont’s Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. This nocturnal history of London was constructed through literature. He relies on everything from Geoffrey Chaucer to Charles Dickens to William Shakespeare, amongst others to reconstruct the nocturnal London, though he focuses particularly on the 16th and 17th centuries. The Amazon reviews are about what you would expect, especially the negative ones. They castigate Beaumont for writing ‘history’ using ‘literature.’ And you can see the logic here. Literature isn’t history, it’s make-believe. It’s fiction. And I can certainly hear some of my professors saying the exact same thing.
I use fiction a fair lot when teaching. I assign ‘history’ for my students to read besides the textbook, but I also make wide use of fiction. This is true both in the case of literature and film. So how is literature history, you ask?
Literature is a reflection of the time in which it is written. This is true of historical fiction and non-historical fiction. The historical fiction of our era is a reflection of our attempt to find a way through changing and complex times. It is a reaching back for something simpler (as we imagine the past to be), or for an explanation of the world through the past. Literature, like film, reflects the mood of the times, the neuroses we, as a society, carry. What fascinates, puzzles, and frustrates us. It is, in many ways it is the id to our rational ego.
So Beaumont reconstructs a history of London through fiction, and in so doing, he discovers what London’s nighttime meant to writers in their time and their place in London’s past. Chaucer’s 14th century London is a very different beast from Shakespeare’s 16th and 17th century version, just as his is different from Charles Dickens’ 19th century London, which is different from Zadie Smith’s 20th and 21st century London. But each of those authors reflect the city as it was in those times and those places.
And while their stories may be fictitious, the city they are set in is not. Each of these authors takes great effort to reflect London, the London they knew, to their reader. And this is the point of using literature as an historical text. Fictitious as the stories may be, their settings are not.
And so Beaumont’s nocturnal journey through London after dark is, in fact, a history.
How We Remember: Siblings and Memory
November 9, 2015 § 15 Comments
My wife and I are watching the BBC show Indian Summers. It’s about the British Raj in 1930s India and its summer retreat at Simla, in the foothills of the Himilayas. The show centres around Ralph Whelan, an orphan who has risen in the British civil service in India to become the Personal Secretary to the viceroy, as well as his sister, Alice who has mysteriously shown up in Simla, leaving behind some murkiness. Alice, you see, was married, and she claimed her husband is dead. However, it turns out he is not. I don’t know how this turns out yet, we’re only 5 episodes in.
But what interests me is the relationship between siblings. Ralph is the elder child, though it’s not entirely clear how big a difference in age there is between he and Alice. Nevertheless, it is big enough to make a huge difference in their upbringing. It’s also not clear when their parents died. Both Ralph and Alice were born in India, but Alice was sent back to England when she was 8, presumably when their parents died. She has only recently returned to the colony. Ralph, it appears, has spent most of his life in India.
The memories of Ralph and Alice of their childhood are radically different. In the first episode, Ralph manages to have dug out a rocking horse that Alice apparently loved as a child. She has no recollection of it. And this sets the pattern. Every time Ralph recalls something from their childhood, Alice responds with a blank look. At one point, she says “I didn’t have the same upbringing” as Ralph did.
I found myself thinking about the relationship between siblings and memory. Halbwachs notes the social aspect of memory, how we actually form our memories in society, not individually. In her acknowledgements to her graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel provides a hint to the disparate memories of siblings when she thanks her family for not objecting to her publishing the book. In Fun Home, Bechdel ponders her father’s death against the discovery that he was closeted, all the while she figures out her own sexuality and comes out. Her memory of the events, and the way it is told, is carefully curated. She controls the entire story, obviously, as its her story. But, clearly, the hint is that her siblings (to say nothing of her mother) might remember things differently.
Even in my own family, largely due to the 5 1/2 years separating me from my younger sister and the 12 1/2 years between my brother and I, it often feels like we grew up in three different families. I remember things differently than my sister, and we both remember events differently than our brother does. Even events all three of us clearly remember, there are wide disparities in how we remember things go down.
As the experiences of the fictitious Whelan siblings, the real Bechdels, and me and my siblings, the existence and function of memory in a family counters Halbwachs’ claims about the formation of a collective memory. Indeed, given the strife that tends to exist in almost all families, it is clear that perhaps the formation of memories and narratives in families works differently tan in wider society.
The International Museum of Folklore
February 13, 2015 § 6 Comments
In his Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History & Social Memory, Guy Beiner talks a lot about folklore in Connacht, the western-most Irish province. This is where the failed 1798 French invasion took place, and Beiner attempts an archaeology of the folklore of the region in relation to the invasion and its relation to the wider 1798 Rebellion in Ireland.
I’ve never really worked in the realm of folklore, but I’ve always been fascinated by it, dating back to my undergrad years, though my profs were all insistent that folklore did not belong in a history class. In grad school, I read Ian McKaye’s book, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, which was about the collection of Scots and Irish folklore, especially in Cape Breton by Helen Creighton and others in the early decades of the 20th century, around the same time that folklorists were running all over Ireland, England, Scotland, the United States, and various other countries, collecting the folk stories of the region.
Beiner argues that
It is often claimed that modernization struck a deathblow to ‘traditional’ oral culture. Yet, developments in communication and information technologies also provided new media for the transmission and documentation of folklore.
Beiner goes on to discuss all the ways in which modern technology has aided in the collection and dissemination of traditional cultures and folklores. But he is clearly overlooking the fact that modernization DID work to kill traditional oral culture, a point made brilliantly by Angela Bourke in her The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story. This point is made all the more clearly by Keith Basso in his Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Languages Among the Western Apache. Most of the events described by Basso, in terms of his ethnographic amongst the Western Apache of Arizona, take place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, yet his book was published in 1995. In his epilogue, Basso notes the massive change that had come to the community of Cibecue in the fifteen years between his ethnographic work and the book, and what is clear is that modern technology and modern life was killing the traditional way of life for the Western Apache, and with that, traditional relations to the land and the ancestors, which came through in what could be called folklore.
Ireland was no different (nor was any other folk culture anywhere). Modernization has worked to kill traditional oral culture. And while the stories still exist, and we can sill read them and listen to story-tellers, the culture they describe no longer exists. Folklore, through the very act of collection in the early 20th century, was made static and museumized. It became something to be fetishized and studied, and ceased to be a living thing.
Margaret Atwood: CanCon Queen
March 13, 2014 § Leave a comment
Last weekend, I read Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, the second of her dystopian trilogy (Oryx & Crake is the first part and MaddAddam is part three). I mentioned Oryx & Crake briefly in my post in January about my 2013 reading. There I noted I’ve never been an Atwood fan. But this trilogy is making me re-think my position. I spent a lot of time with both Oryx & Crake and The Year of the Flood simply overwhelmed with the world Atwood has created for this trilogy. I can see influences from outside sources, and with her previous fascinations with dystopia, most notably in The Handmaid’s Tale, but mostly I’m just impressed that Atwood could invent this alternate universe.
At any rate. Throughout The Year of the Flood, I appreciated reading a Canadian author, maybe out of a sense of missing home, or maybe just enjoying Atwood’s sly humour. The religious cult that is at the centre of this book, God’s Gardeners, have sanctified various ecologists, biologists, zoologists, and others who worked to protect the animals and the environment. God’s Gardeners are a pacifist, vegan sect who believe in the sanctity of all life, incorporating various aspects of Christianity, Buddhism, and the scientific revolution into their belief systems. When Adam One, the leader of God’s Gardeners gives a speech for the Feast of Saint Dian Fossey, Atwood slyly slips in Canadian content:
Today is Saint Dian’s Day, consecrated to interspecies empathy. On this day, we invoke Saint Jerome of Lions, Saint Robert Brown of Mice, and Saint Christopher Smart of Cats; also Saint Farley Mowat of Wolves, and the Ikhwan al-Safa and their Letter of the Animals. But especially Saint Dian Fossey, who gave her life while defending the Gorillas from ruthless exploitation. She laboured for a Peaceable Kingdom, in which all Life would be respected.
“Saint” Farley Mowat is one of Canada’s best-loved authors, at least he used to be. He’s still kicking around at age 92, but he reached the pinnacle of his fame in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He is most known for his work on the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and the wolves of the Canadian tundra. For me, though, he is the author of the children’s lit Canadian classic, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. I loved that book when I was a child.
The “peaceable kingdom,” is a biblical reference, yes. But it is also a reference to Canada, the land of “peace, order, and good government,” according to the Constitution (though the latter has been lacking since January 2006).
The Spanish Civil War: On Memory and Forgetting
March 10, 2014 § Leave a comment
I have just finished reading Jeremy Treglown’s fantastic Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936. Treglown is a literary critic, so he approaches history and memory in a manner rather different than a historian, nonetheless, there is definite overlap in methodologies. I must say, I was originally concerned when I picked up the book and read this on the dust jacket: “True or False: Memory is not the same thing as History.” Um, yeah, true. No kidding. But, the whims of publishers are rather different than the arguments of authors.
Treglown does a fantastic job of dealing with the complexities of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 and then the long Francoist dictatorship from 1939 until the Generalisimo’s death in 1975 and the transition to democracy that followed. Treglown works very hard against the myth that Republicans = Good and Nationalists = bad during the Civil War. He also works hard against the myth that Franco’s régime was purely repressive and oppressive vis-à-vis art and artists, noting that a great amount of art (film, literature, music, visual art, sculpture) emerged in Francoist Spain. This is not to say that Treglown paints a rosy picture of Francoist Spain. He doesn’t. He doesn’t glorify Franco, but he seeks to complicate the dictator and the community of artists in Spain during and since the Civil War. He also deals with the complexity of characters like Camilo José Cela.
Cela was a nationalist soldier during the Civil War, and later worked as the censor for the Francoist state. And yet, he was also himself a novelist, and remarkably blunt and sensitive in his work. He began a literary journal in 1956 “as a way of countering cultural officialdom and giving space to the ideas of Spanish writers living abroad.” A noble sentiment, given that most of those expat Spanish writers were expatriates due to the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship.
Treglown points to Cela’s most famous work, San Camilo, 1936. While San Camilo, 1936, has been criticised for a lack of morality, both due to the amount of time the characters spend in brothels and Cela’s avoidance of the larger issues of the war, it is in the details that the novel works. Cela shows the moral and actual ambiguity of war, in Treglown’s words:
Above all, San Camilo, 1936 grieves for Spain, gazing at a graveyard full of flowers of all colors, ignoring the shouts of “¡Viva la república!” and “¡Viva España!” because “it is no use being too enthusiastic when melancholy nests in the heart.
But what mostly interests me about Treglown’s discussion about San Camilo, 1936 is the intersection between memory and forgetting. As Cela writes, “No one knows whether it is better to remember or to forget. Memory is sad and forgetting on the other hand usually repairs and heals.” Nevertheless, as Treglown notes, San Camilo, 1936, is essentially a “puzzled, angry act of commemoration.” In other words, Cela and his characters remain ambivalent with what is to be done with trauma, history and memory.
I find Cela’ claims about the virtues of forgetting to be interesting. We live in an era that seems to believe the opposite in many ways. In our times, cultural historical memories have been exhumed and examined in public. Sometimes this takes the form of commemoration, (such as in Cork, Ireland, in the summer of 1997, marking the 150th anniversary of the Famine) or commissions of Truth and Reconciliation (such as in South Africa after Apartheid). Treglown himself recounts attempts by the caretakers of Franco’s memory to maintain his dignity, three decades later at the Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen), a huge monument outside of Madrid to honour the Nationalist fallen of the Civil War. Meanwhile, since the end of the dictatorship in 1975, the Spanish have attempted to exhume the bodies of massacred Republican soldiers and sympathisers. Indeed, the balance of power has tipped in favour of the Republicans, to the point where the atrocities committed by them during the Civil War have been whitewashed, just as the Francoists whitewashed the Nationalist atrocities.
Cela’s words, however, led me to think about Marc Bloch’s blistering Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, about the quick Fall of France at the start of the Second World War. Bloch, a captain in the French Army and the country’s most famous historian, wrote this on the run from the Nazis (who eventually killed him). Strange Defeat is a searing book, almost painful to read, written by a fierce French patriot stunned and shocked his nation collapsed in defeat at the hands of the Nazis. Bloch blames France’s political and military leaders for failing to have prepared for modern warfare. And while Bloch remains an annaliste (the school of historical scholarship Bloch pioneered) in writing Strange Defeat, the immediacy of the events he’s describing and his anger and fury are clear.
Bloch was too close to the events, and too involved, to provide a long-view analysis of the Fall of France (nor, for that matter, did he wish to). The same can be said of Cela, a Nobel laureate. San Camilo, 1936 was published in 1969, thirty years after the end of the Civil War, while Franco was still alive and in power. Cela, like Bloch, was involved in the events his novel attempts (or doesn’t attempt) to deal with, and his view on the past, memory, and forgetting is perhaps not surprising.
My grandfather, Rodney Browne, was 17 when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943. He was a tail gunner, which meant his chances of survival were pretty slim. And yet he did survive, and he came home to Montréal in 1945 with the conclusion of the war. But he was traumatised, deeply. He suffered silently, primarily by drinking. And he was restless, unable to settle into a job or family life, until his late 40s/early 50s, nearly thirty years after the war. By the time I was born, Rod was settled, married again, and he was a good grandfather. It is from him that I gained an historical consciousness about the Irish in Montréal. He didn’t talk about his past much, and he never talked about the war. I later found out that this was pretty common for men of his generation who served in the Second World War. He didn’t want to remember, which is why he drank when he got home, trying to obliterate those memories.
So maybe, it is the generation who lives through the worst of the trauma that wishes to forget, to never have to think of the atrocities they saw or committed. It is their descendants who feel the need to excavate these memories. Either way, these are not complete thoughts on memory, commemorations, and forgetting. Memory and forgetting remain incredibly powerful tools in historical scholarship.
Matterhorn: Fiction of the Vietnam War
February 4, 2014 § Leave a comment
Last February, I was back in Vancouver for a visit. I love visiting Vancouver, a city I know well (having grown up there). Everytime I’m back in town, I go to Blackberry Books on Granville Island. I have bought many, many books there over the years. This time when I was in, I got into a long chat with the guy working there about history and fiction (two of my favourite subjects) and he recommended Karl Marlantes’ sprawling Vietnam War book, Matterhorn. It’s an epic novel, telling the story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his indoctrination into the jungle war. It takes a long, long time to get going, I must say, but eventually it became engrossing and nearly impossible to put down. The guy at Blackberry Books said that he doesn’t read long fiction anymore, but this book was an exception to his rule. I agree. For some odd reason, probably due to the amount of American history I’ve taught of late, I’ve read a lot of Vietnam War fiction, and Matterhorn is definitely up there with Tim O’Brien’s two works, The Things They Carried and If I Die in A Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.
The Making of the Historian
January 12, 2014 § Leave a comment
One of my favourite history books is Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary. The book, published in 2001, tells the story of Bridget Cleary’s death at the hands of her husband, Michael, and a mixture of extended family, in Ballyvadlea, Co. Tipperary in Ireland in March 1895. As Bourke unravels the story, the murder of Bridget Cleary is an opportunity for the historian (or folklorist, in her case) to examine the collision between modern culture and folkways. Ballyvadlea in 1895 was essentially the boondocks of Ireland, far removed from the encroaching modern world, people there still lived according to old Irish ways, with beliefs in fairies, banshees, and the like. Whether or not Michael Cleary and his cohorts actually believed in this is neither here nor there, argues Bourke, what matters is that the belief system still existed and was still accessible to Cleary and his co-conspirators.
When I was in graduate school, I was fascinated by the collision between modernity and ancient folkways. In particular, I was interested in charivari, a means of community policing in pre-modern societies in Europe and amongst settler societies in North America. In fact, I was so interested in this, I set out to do my Master’s degree on this topic in Québec. What fascinated me then, and still does today, and why I enjoy Bourke’s book so much (I usually assign it when I teach Irish History) is the way in which modern legal culture intersects with traditional folkways.
Societies have traditionally been able to police themselves. Today, we live in a society where the state is omnipresent, whether in the form of of our driver’s licenses, or the regulation of education, and various other means. When someone breaks the law, we expect the police to make an arrest, the prosecutor to secure a conviction, and the jail to secure the lawbreaker until her debt to society is paid. But it hasn’t always been that way.
In October 1855, Robert Corrigan was beaten to death in Saint-Sylvestre, Québec, a remote agricultural community, some fifty miles south of Québec City, in the foothills of the Appalachians. He was beaten by a gang of his neighbours for stepping out of line. They did not mean to kill him, they meant to discipline him for his bullying, aggressive behaviour. That Corrigan was an Irish Protestant and his murderers Irish Catholics was secondary (at least in Saint-Sylvestre, for the rest of Canada, that was the most important detail in the highly sectarian mid-19th century). When the state attempted to arrest the accused men, they were easily able to elude the police forces sent in from Montréal and Québec, aided by their neighbours. When they did finally turn themselves in in January 1856, they did so on their own terms. They were also able to rig the jury when they went to trial in February so that they were acquitted.
The Corrigan Affair, in this light, was entirely about a local community maintaining its right to police itself in the face of the power of the state. The mid-19th century in Canada was a time of massive state formation and expansion. The same period in Québec saw a spate of construction projects around the province of courthouses and jails and other such buildings. The buildings were all the same down to the shade of paint used on them. Why? Because the state was attempting to establish its control across the province and it was attempting to do so with the message that the state was indifferent to local contingencies. Not surprisingly, the people of Québec rebelled against this. The mid-19th century in Canada offers endless examples of local communities rebelling against the state in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
The Wild West in the United States is another such example. The West has a reputation for violence that is only partly deserved. Much of the legends of the Wild West are just that: legends. But violence there was. Much of it was about the same thing as charivari in England or The Corrigan Affair in Québec: community policing. Disputes were settled between the belligerents for several reasons, most importantly, the state did not have the power yet to mediate between its citizens.
Historians have been studying this collision between folkways and the rise of modernity since the 1960s. During that era, that great generation of English historians (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Dorothy Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm) became fascinated by this collision. I always find it interesting when I see the influence of the historians I read in graduate school still on me today, all these years later.
Last semester, our favourite work study student, Alvaro, graduated. Alvaro had worked in our departmental office since we both (as in my wife and I) arrived here in the fall of 2012. For his graduation, we decided to buy him the books that had the greatest impact on us in our development as historians, as Alvaro is planning on going on to graduate school. I got him E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. I first read this book in 1996, my first semester of graduate school. It was one of the few books I read in graduate school where I just couldn’t put it down. Meticulously research, and brilliantly insightful, Thompson crafted an historical study that could stand on its own on its literary merits. I re-read it a couple of years ago. It remains one of my favourite books of all time.
On Reading: My Books of 2013
January 2, 2014 § 5 Comments
I read. A lot. In 2013, I decided to track the books I read for pleasure, so I created this stack. It got dangerously tall and slightly unsteady around November. This also doesn’t include the other two dozen books I read for classes and research purposes in 2013. But of this stack of 33 books I read in 2013, I can happily report that almost all of them were excellent reads and all but a couple were, at least for me, important reads. I have blogged about some them already. (Kim Eichlen’s The Disappeared; Eleanor Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints (and here) Teofilio Ruiz’s The Terror of History; C.J. Shivers’ The Gun; Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind (also here); Terry Eagleton’s On Evil; and Amy Waldman’s The Submission). Time permitting, I will write about more of these books.
So, for those wondering, the best non-fiction book I read last year was Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, with Eagleton’s On Evil a close second. As far as fiction goes, I’d say it was a tie between Hilary Mantel’s Bringing Up the Bodies, Zadie Smith’s NW and the grande dame of CanLit, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Here’s the interesting thing: I’ve never liked Atwood. I’ve always thought that her ability as a writer couldn’t cash the cheques here imagination wrote. But Oryx and Crake has caused me to re-think my position. The next two books in that trilogy, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam are in my stack of books to read already.
The only truly disappointing book I read in 2013 was the 1993 Booker Prize winner, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, by Roddy Doyle, the great Irish novelist whose work I have always enjoyed. Tant pis.
Matthew Barlow 