Mar 26, 2017 - latter's With Fire and Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886) and Pan Michael .... (1931â40, published posthumously in 1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov.
DONALD C. JACKMAN
HISTORICAL FICTION AND FANTASY HISTORY
The highly charged Snowden matter of eminent public record coincided with the appearance of the novella Into Exile by Philip Winsor. As publisher I accepted the completed draft before the beginning of February of 2013, when the book received its title, which economy and the dynamic suggested. From this moment forward, the title steadily acquired a more general context. Edward Snowden took leave of absence from his government contractor posting in Hawaii and began establishing contact with members of the press to arrange for the disclosure of a vast trove of documents purloined from the National Security Agency (NSA). As the leaking of documents proceeded, Snowden fled to Hong Kong. A criminal complaint was filed against him in U.S. federal court on June 14, and on June 23 he arrived in Russia with temporary asylum.1 Meanwhile, the editorial process having been completed, an e-book version of Into Exile appeared; the copyright claim was uploaded to the Library of Congress on 12 November 2013. 2 On December 18 the General Assembly of the United Nations denounced warrantless surveillance of the sort conducted by the NSA,3 this being the central object of Snowden’s disclosures. In much the same way, the protagonist of Into Exile arranges to publish documentary evidence of totalitarian subversion as he passes beyond the reach of U.S. law. The title of the book can thus be said to generalize and dramatize a special set of circumstances that gave rise, in that very instant, to a sequence of epoch-making events. Thus the writing of Into Exile altogether preceded the Snowden matter, and by the time of its publication revelations of NSA surveillance were in the -1-
process of unleashing a crescendo of international opprobrium—but there is no overt connection here. Rather, there is what one might call an “intelligent coincidence.” An approximation is provided by the novella Futility published in 1898,4 in which an ocean liner named Titan, believed to be unsinkable, strikes a North Atlantic iceberg and founders with massive loss of life owing to its lack of lifeboats. A copy of that book allegedly was housed in the library of the real-life Titanic,5 which sank in identical circumstances on its maiden voyage in April 1912. Apparently the author could imagine the situation and perhaps foresee it to a considerable extent. However, while Futility is a stab at fiction suited for an uncouth readership craving the comic and the bizarre, Into Exile is honed by its author’s studied interest in novelistic structures and themes. According to current taxonomies, Into Exile belongs in the genre of Speculative Fiction and its sub-genre of Alternative History. But we also see that it stands surprisingly close to reality and actuality. To adjust the taxonomy we should consider the connection between history and “alternative history” as well as the visible objectives of historical fiction. Alternative history in its pure form involves a grand departure from the known course of history and an exploration of divergent contingencies. Yet evidence of alteration can be found in all historical fiction. The great resounding historical novels—one must think of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869)— take events, such as military campaigns, that actually happened, and then spin off in a fictional manner. This is the underlying formula of a novel such as The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh,6 where there is no intention to present history in any form other than the real. The author’s principal goal is a coming-to-grips with the realities of war—glory and distinction are left aside as utterly inconsequential in comparison to the devastation, pathos, and brutality of war. Accurate detail is vital for achieving such a goal, and fiction serves with representative stories that allow the realities to be generalized into a message that is imbibed.
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Substitute History In many other novels, historical details are consciously and purposefully altered. The fiction can take exclusive hold. Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) appears to present a historical mystery of a schoolgirl’s disappearance, but is actually pure fiction retaining only the cultural setting of the historical period in question. After finally becoming aware of the fiction, the reader takes a certain perverse pleasure in having been deceived so thoroughly. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) is a more complex case, in part because it is not set primarily in the past, though its historical and quasihistorical content is quite massive. Shortly after its appearance a reader described it to me in rough terms and asked me to provide historical reading matter that would cast light on its themes. This highly educated individual evidently imagined the book as some fount of learning and wished to affirm or dispel that impression. Upon perusing my suggested materials, 7 he rapidly lost interest, realizing no doubt that The Da Vinci Code’s historical underpinnings were quite bogus. For my own interest, upon finishing the book I conducted a careful investigation into its basis. This was an unexpectedly simple task, since the foundations were drawn almost entirely from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a pseudo-investigative work purporting to demonstrate the crucial value of sources that actually had been forged by twentieth-century hoaxers.8 Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a bestseller in its own right, made many further sales on the back of The Da Vinci Code, and together they spawned a pseudo-genre comprising half-baked excursions (whether literary, pseudo-historical, or spiritual) on the theme of a putative line of descent from Jesus and Mary Magdalene—a veritable blight on the book publishing industry and the more gullible sectors of the reading public. There is little question that The Da Vinci Code’s author had made a conscious effort to deceive readers into -3-
believing a false set of historical circumstances. But the attempt to revise history by adopting a substitute can at least lead to questions about the role of veritas in historical fiction. Birth of the Historical Novel In the development of the historical novel, La princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de la Fayette is a seventeenth-century outlier: while not entirely unique as such,9 its connection to later novels of the Romantic period remains tenuous, despite its enduring popularity. It is conceivable that Mme de la Fayette transposed characters from her contemporary scene to a sixteenthcentury setting, and perhaps she did this to disguise their identities. If so, her utilization of history would be opportunistic rather than systematic. However, her interest in the chosen time-frame, specifically the years 1558 and 1559, is intense: her familiarity with persons and events of that period impresses at every turn. A possible motive for setting the story in that period is the simplistic manner in which the court society mirrored her own: 10 an autocratic sovereign (Henri II) had a maîtresse-en-titre (Diane de Poitiers) as in her own era (Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan). Conversely, an intersection between the cast of characters and the author’s own intimate circle is sufficiently noteworthy as to deserve special emphasis. Mme de la Fayette’s close friends included Marie Jeanne Baptiste of SavoyNemours,11 a great-granddaughter of Jacques, duke of Nemours, who is the chief male protagonist of La princesse de Clèves. In the book, this duke’s love interest, Mademoiselle de Chartres, becomes Madame de Clèves, and she is the only character who is wholly fictitious. In order to extrapolate from this remarkable conjunction, we must first look to actual history. The famous love interest of the real Duke Jacques of Nemours was Françoise de Rohan, a royal cousin. In 1556 they exchanged a vow of marriage before witnesses, but the duke subsequently discarded her, leaving her pregnant.
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The evolving scandal became inextricable from the religious strife that had begun to engulf France. Françoise’s mother converted to Calvinism in 1558, and Françoise thereafter became increasingly associated with the Huguenots. Duke Jacques, conversely, was firmly attached to the ultra-Catholic party of the Guises, all the more so when he married the duke of Guise’s widow, Anna of Este, in 1566. The process leading to Françoise’s vindication took more than twenty years and was notorious throughout Europe. 12 The novel develops a completely different story, where Madame de Clèves falls in love with Duke Jacques after her marriage and is assailed by guilt. 13 Seen in this light, the novel appears to pursue fantasy history and will be examined later when we come to that category. The historical novel proper begins with Sir Walter Scott. Sometimes called the “stepfather of the middle ages,” he innovated by constructing and foregrounding historical settings, yet sometimes he drew on history simply to fuel romance. More often than not his novels on medieval themes mix a few facts with an array of assumptions in accord with the sensibilities of his readers. Is this not the essence of romantic fiction? It was important to Scott neither that the historical facts be represented faithfully, nor that all of the readers’ assumptions about medieval culture be valid. The famous Ivanhoe (1820), set in the late twelfth century, is rife with anachronisms. The Talisman (1825), also set in that era, may enthrall the reader with its oriental themes, but on inspection it is a poor excuse of a story. In Quentin Durward (1823), with the somewhat less alien backdrop of the fifteenth century, Scott sets his plot by brazenly juxtaposing unrelated historical events, something of which the reader remains blissfully ignorant. The historical distortions of Kenilworth (1821), an Elizabethan novel, are still more egregious. Scott contributed to his times by publicizing the middle ages and by infusing history with romantic appeal. But those uses no longer serve. It is conceivable that relatively few of his historical novels show appreciable historical understanding. Certainly one must look more towards Scottish -5-
settings in the century or so preceding Scott—thus novels such as Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818)—for significant historical insight. The situation of Scott’s younger contemporary, the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, can be compared: The Last of the Mohicans (1826), his chef-d’œuvre, is set during the French and Indian War only seventy years earlier and in terrain familiar to the author. Conversely, Mary Shelley addressed the dangers of anachronism directly: her Valperga (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), both set in the later middle ages, involved intensive research. The latter book drew inspiration from Ivanhoe,14 yet these novels are more concerned with characters than with plot-lines. An early divergence from the groundwork laid by Scott came in the form of I promessi sposi (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni. Here perhaps for the first time in historical fiction are powerful presentations of the human condition and explorations of human psychology. History provides not much more than a backdrop, yet the author took pains to establish accuracy. Manzoni is also noteworthy in that he wrote a discourse on the historical novel, including this general observation on the author’s role.15 Both the purpose and design of the author are, as much as possible, to make the subject and all the action so verisimilar with respect to the time in which they are set that they would have seemed probable even to people of that time, had the novel been written for them. As Manzoni explained, the critics tended to focus on two issues: that such works sow confusion and therefore present an obstacle to historical knowledge, or conversely that by distinguishing too carefully between fact and invention the author destroys the artistic unity of the work. Alfred de Vigny, whose Cinq Mars (1826) is sometimes cited as the first historical novel in France, supplied later editions of his work with a preface responding to such criticisms. He suggested that history itself is in some measure a work of art, 16
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which, while doing nothing to mollify the critics, serves his purpose well in retrospect. Honoré de Balzac set The Chouans (1829), the first novel in his “La Comédie Humaine” series, merely thirty years in the past, but it places political and military events in the foreground and must thus be classed as historical fiction. Balzac thereafter moved towards realism and contemporary society, but left a further historical novel, About Catherine de Medici (1830–42), offering a revision to the slanders frequently directed at that protagonist by historians—a revision which Dumas subsequently placed again in doubt. Victor Hugo, despite his reputation based on Les miserables, wrote few novels and only one mature work of historical fiction, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (i.e. Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831), with little to place it directly in its assigned period of the late fifteenth century. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin researched and realized a historical novel, The Captain’s Daughter (1836), essentially a romance. Scott’s mantle of historical novelist fell squarely on the shoulders of Alexandre Dumas, who, even as he rode the crest of the roman-feuilleton mania—the serializing of novels in daily newspapers—caught a glimpse of an intellectual dimension. Historical fiction should contribute to the understanding of history; but more than that, it should contribute in a manner to which it is uniquely suited. His sprawling novels span the history of France from Renaissance to Revolution and beyond, often in profound detail. His purposes included the education of his readers: history was made digestible for them and to all intents and purposes was experienced by them. A custodian of sorts by definition, he had a responsibility to represent history, if not accurately, then at least faithfully. One possible platform for inaccuracy is when the record of historical sources, which is imperfect, permits strong inferences that find no place in a closely factual account.
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The alteration of fact, when it arises, must be measured and justified against the responsibility to represent faithfully. As a prime example, when Dumas formed some of his famous novels around the fairly minor historical character of d’Artagnan, he heavily fictionalized the protagonist and his associates; but sticking to the truth would have been to no avail, since too little of the truth was knowable! Rather, d’Artagnan was made to participate in a story that captured the reader’s imagination and presented much that was genuine. In these circumstances it cannot be said that the historical d’Artagnan was betrayed, even if inconsistencies are apparent. The spirit of historical inquiry was not violated: rather, it was enlivened.17 Dumas worked with collaborators, the most significant among them being Auguste Maquet, with whose assistance almost all of the major novels were written (from The Conspirators of 1842 to The Queen’s Necklace of 1850). The question might arise as to which—author or assistant—was responsible for historical distortions. As early as 1845, however, there was a certain current of opinion that Dumas was not the principal contributor and perhaps had written not even a single word of the novels attributed to him. 18 It is entirely conceivable that Dumas’ personal appearance was behind this; for he was of African slave background. Today we are familiar with the baseless denial of Barack Obama’s birth on United States soil—a prerequisite for holding the presidency—by the very man who would succeed him as U.S. president. Doubts cast on Dumas’ authorship of his writings offer a remarkable parallel. Racism undoubtedly existed, as President Chirac noted in 2002, when Dumas’ ashes were transferred in a solemn procession to the crypt of the Panthéon to lie alongside the tombs of Hugo and Zola.19 Any case for Dumas’ subordinate status in the production of these novels must be founded on unsatisfactory documentation and specious inference. 20 The better course by far is to consider the best of the novels, imagine its genesis, and then decide whether anyone but Dumas could have conceived it. La Dame de Monsoreau (1846, English translation usually titled Chicot the -8-
Jester) is a particularly good candidate for this inquiry. It is certainly among the best—always provided one uses an edition that in no way is abridged— and it carries with it a visible thread of development allowing insight into its genesis. For La dame de Monsoreau must be understood as standing in distinct relation to the works of Mme de la Fayette, just as all historical novels most likely connect in some manner with each of their predecessors dealing with similar historical materials. We saw that Mme de la Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves is set in the earliest period of religious strife in France. Several years previously, that same author had written La princesse de Montpensier (1662), a novella focusing on the central period of the French wars of religion and notably on Duke Henri of Guise, a key political figure in Dumas’ “Valois trilogy” of which La dame de Monsoreau is the middle component. A very similar connection must exist with Henri III et sa cour (1829), the play that first brought Dumas riches and fame and is said to have inaugurated the Romantic stage drama in France: here Duke Henri of Guise is the villain of the piece. One can only suppose that Henri III et sa cour was carefully constructed with Mme de la Fayette’s thematic overlap in view; for the overlap was obvious to those playgoers—and undoubtedly there were many 21—who were familiar with her writings. In conceiving this play Dumas lighted, in an obscure history, upon the theme of Duke Henri’s revenge on his wife for infidelity.22 But it is wrong to assume that, “not knowing very much about the characters, he began research on them.” 23 For the subject of Duke Henri’s sentimental history was undoubtedly familiar to him from La princesse de Montpensier. It is only natural that Dumas should have looked ultimately towards the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre at Paris in August 1572 as a likely theme for historical fiction. Henri III et sa cour seems a veritable prelude to such an undertaking, concentrating as it does on the cold cruelty of the vengeful duke, so manifest at the time of the massacre. The trail leads 24 to La reine Margot -9-
(1845), his most dramatic and compact novel. While developing that project, he was also turning once more to Henri III, and his collection of relevant historical materials continued apace. Some maintain that Dumas did not read much in the sources, the unearthing of useful details being left to Maquet—allegedly “the little drudge who blew the dust off old books, turned their delicate pages, and brought back interesting tidbits for the maître to turn into rousing good yarns.” 25 Yet in his memoirs Dumas mentions his principal sources for Henri III et sa cour:26 they include—long before he made use of literary assistants—estimable primary sources reflecting purposeful inquiry and deep deliberation. A historical personage whom Dumas no doubt discovered in his background research for Henri III et sa cour provides arguably the most extraordinary protagonist in his entire corpus. From the little genuine historical information that is preserved, one at least knows that the royal jester Chicot was unique in being no mere fool, but a gentleman of quality and martial bent. 27 Chicot’s wit and initiative carry the reader through much of La dame de Monsoreau. His elaborate insults, hurled at all and sundry, cause the reader paroxysms and are much more precise and self-contained than the Rabelaisian fare that surely inspired them. His wisdom, born of devotion to the troubled king’s interests, eventually shines through as well. These assuredly are passages from the hand of the maître. The novel’s second protagonist, Bussy d’Amboise, of whose existence Dumas was well aware since Henri III et sa cour,28 was a man widely celebrated in his day for gallantry and bravery. As such he cannot reasonably survive the course of this novel, but until he is dispatched he can be a paragon, challenging the reader to imagine whether such a creature can really have existed, although the memoirs of the king’s sister Marguerite describe him in roughly those terms.29 In experiencing avid enthusiasm for Bussy, the reader avoids envelopment by the dark aspects of the history—the hubris, the treason, the espionage—all well enough documented in historical sources. - 10 -
That is to the good, for actions have motives that are not always plain to view. To test the hypothesis of Bussy’s sincerity, Dumas must to all intents and purposes invent Diane de Méridor, who through ruse and duress is forced to become the wife of the count of Monsoreau. Clearly the real Bussy was romantically involved with the real Monsoreau’s wife, of whom little is known except that, unlike Diane, she was already a young widow when she married Monsoreau.30 And far from being assassinated in Paris at a house on the Rue Saint-Antoine, Bussy actually met his end at La Coutancière, Monsoreau’s provincial castle; his body was left exposed in the moat to mark the killing as justifiable homicide, and for several years thereafter his father sought to bring Monsoreau to account.31 The Bussy of La dame de Monsoreau could not die so, not merely because the author was testing an optimistic appraisal of his character, but chiefly because of his contrastingly pessimistic hypothesis regarding the king’s brother, the duke of Anjou, to whom he attributes the death blow. This is a more significant historical hypothesis because it is an invitation for the reader to consider the historical record in that light. For the character interpretations of historical fiction can assist our assessments of important historical individuals, where only limited historical source material is available.32 The alteration of history in connection with Bussy’s death is evidence, not of the author’s insouciance as one might think, but of a genuine solicitude for the problems of interpreting and assimilating history. We shall never know the small ways in which reality resembled Dumas’ fiction;33 but the fiction at least opens to possible insights. It is not simply invention, but the product of specific calculations involving what can be known, what can be inferred, and what can be imagined. The mental processes are readily observable in the “duel of the mignons,” which forms the closing chapters of La dame de Monsoreau. This combat took place on 27 April 1578 and pitted the king’s favorite Quélus and two of his intimates against three others among whom Antraguet is said by the chron- 11 -
icler Pierre de l’Estoile to be a favorite of the house of Guise. While historians invariably discuss this duel as a proxy battle between the king and the duke of Guise, Dumas apparently recognized certain deficiencies in that viewpoint. Such open warfare between the king and Guise was unlikely, for the Guises, as is well established, were hatching a grand conspiracy, which for the time being required a semblance of amity with the king. Duke François of Anjou, the king’s brother, conversely, was a constant rival: would not the opponents of Quélus have been his men? There was a certain fluidity among the cliques; earlier Antraguet had been the king’s man, as had Bussy at one time. In the duel of the mignons, Schomberg is said to have fought and died against the king’s friends, although it is known that at an earlier time Schomberg had been one of their number. 34 This last detail encouraged Dumas (mistakenly?) to place Schomberg at the side of Quélus here and throughout the novel. Meanwhile, Antraguet need not have been the duke of Guise’s follower in order to qualify as—following Pierre de l’Estoile—a “favorite of the house of Guise,” for he may well have had a liaison with the duke’s sister, just as he had earlier, it was rumored, with the king’s sister Marguerite. 35 Certainly the period is not as well documented as one might desire, and Dumas was obliged to wade through a quantity of dubious source material. Sources that were not contemporaneous with the events were likely to introduce inaccuracies and falsities. Even contemporaneous sources might contain unnaturally skewed standpoints: this is particularly the case for the time of the wars of religion. In many situations, furthermore, chroniclers themselves could not lay claim to the entire truth behind the nuanced subjects on which they reported. It is remarkable that Dumas could navigate the morass with such equanimity and productivity. In some cases his interpretations have even influenced works of genuine history. His depictions of the jester Chicot were convincing enough to be taken wholesale into a nineteenth-century work on the history of court fools; 36 and a recent scholarly discussion accepts
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without comment that the opponents of Quélus in the duel of the mignons were supporters of Duke François of Anjou.37 As to the mode of Dumas’ collaboration with Maquet, it has been described to considerable effect in Herbert Gorman’s The Incredible Marquis:38 Pushed by newspaper editors, driven by contracts and urged by his allembracing ambition, he created his peculiar manner of composition, of engaging assistants to do the rough work for him, to fetch and carry, to assemble material, to place before him the chaos from which he evolved his absorbing narratives. He was like Napoleon creating campaigns and ordering his maréchaux to carry out specific orders. He was like the great Italian painters who permitted their apprentices to paint in the backgrounds. It is especially when one considers the sheer number of large-scale projects in hand during the years of the Maquet collaboration that one comes to realize how necessary was Maquet’s participation to the success of these ventures. As the collaboration matured, Dumas would have reposed considerable trust in him, leading the assistant eventually to wonder whether he was actually co-authoring these novels. After Dumas succumbed to financial troubles brought on by his extreme conviviality, Maquet rather duplicitously pressed this issue in the courts, thereby augmenting his status among Dumas’ creditors, but losing his bid for recognition as co-author. Maquet was no equal participant and certainly no ghostwriter (or nègre, to cite the appalling term for that function in current French), but a highly adept literary assistant. His many writings under his own name, it may be added, have amounted to little in the scheme of things.39 The worth of Dumas—outside his natural gift for story-telling—resides in his recognition that the historical record is deficient at the interpersonal level. Fiction and historical truth can therefore intersect with some freedom and to some profit, as long as one continues to strive for a representation of real history. Sometimes it may be necessary to achieve dramatic effect by dis- 13 -
torting the factual basis. Thus, in La dame de Monsoreau, Duke François of Anjou joins the conspiracy of the Guises and is duped by them; his treason exposed, he becomes a prisoner in his apartments in the Louvre, but is able to escape through a second-story window and fly to Anjou, where he gathers his forces; the queen mother comes to Angers and negotiates his peace with the king. These several events are not documented. Dumas borrows freely from other events in the lives of these individuals, 40 and his readers’ digestion of history is thereby served—far better than if sheer invention had prevailed. More significantly, he draws attention to questions for consideration. In particular, what was Anjou’s connection to the League in December 1576 when the king thwarted the Guises by placing himself at the head of that ultra-Catholic movement? Dumas, in addition to stressing the farcical aspects of these developments, advances the plausible notion that Anjou aspired to that position. In a novel, to be sure, fictionalizing is permissible. On the one hand, uninterrupted factuality is not expected; and on the other, the historical record does not include enough details to supply a fully coherent narrative. Some of Dumas’ historical novels cannot be analyzed profitably in this manner. For example, his lesser “Valois” novels—The Two Dianas (1847) and The Page of the Duke of Savoy (1853)—digress from historical facts in fundamental ways and are best described as potboiler romance, despite their presentation of large quantities of real history; it is conceivable that in these books Dumas vented his frustration at gaps in the source record preventing an appraisal of particular individuals. His greatest novels, conversely, are not merely well researched, they are constructed for the sake of, and as an encounter with, the historical record. The question was often asked, how did he produce such a vast quantity of work in the 1840s? And the answer is simply that most of these projects had been gestating for years. This he demonstrated implicitly in 1845 by laying wager that it would take no more than 72 hours for him to compose in writing the entire first volume of Le chevalier de Maison-Rouge,
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scheduled for three volumes: he finished with six hours to spare. 41 Only with long and intensive preparation was such a feat possible. In the mid-nineteenth century Dumas dominated the production of historical fiction, just as Scott had before him. Among important writers in the English language in these years, Charles Dickens contributed historical novels in the form of the prosaic Barnaby Rudge (1841) and the sublime A Tale of Two Cities (1859), both set in the late eighteenth century and neither making much of a mark by way of historical interpretation. William Makepeace Thackeray provided The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), Vanity Fair (1848), and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), none of which look into a distant past or develop a significant historical context. Setting themselves apart from those works are The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), by Charles Reade, and Romola (1863), by George Eliot (i.e. Mary Anne Evans): both authors sought to generate insight into late medieval Europe through extraordinary attention to detail. Also of large note is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), set in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay colony and exploring the strictures of Puritan society. The author could rely among other things on family lore, given his descent from one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials.42 It is unclear whether Charles Kingsley made truly distinctive contributions to historical fiction.43 Of a handful of popular historical novels in a literary corpus otherwise mostly religious in character, Hypatia (1853) is perhaps his most estimable, but is well recognized for playing fast and loose with factual detail.44 It is nevertheless likely to have sparked Gustave Flaubert in his creation of Salammbô (1862), a novel that seeks insight into the period of Carthaginian power, a historical “blind spot” when considered alongside Carthage’s light-suffused foe the Roman Republic. By vividly surrounding his interpretations with meticulous detail and careful source readings, Flaubert wove history and fantasy into a single fabric. In both Hypatia and Salammbô the protagonist is eventually hacked to death by a mob. But Salammbô is an - 15 -
achievement that is often neglected, and it occupies a recognizable place in the tradition of Dumas. The Promethean figure of Tolstoy then follows, supplying a historical novel that all subsequent efforts can be measured against. It should not be overlooked, however, that War and Peace documented, for want of a better word, the Eurocentrism of Russia (or at least of its upper class). This novel served national cultural awareness, and in that regard Tolstoy was followed by J. P. Jacobsen, whose Fru Marie Grubbe (1876) focuses on a seventeenth-century Danish noblewoman, and by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz. The latter’s With Fire and Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886) and Pan Michael (1888) explore, more through the lives of the people than through specific events, the unique historical situation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the period of the Cossack uprisings and subsequent wars with Sweden, Muscovy, and the Ottoman empire. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Sienkiewicz in 1905 “because of his outstanding merits as an epic writer.” Historical fiction had come of age. Dystopia and Alternative History Dystopia begins roughly in 1895 with H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, but this book does not fully distinguish itself from science-fiction—a category to which so much is owed to Jules Verne—since its principal subject matter is the time travel itself, not the specific future society visited by the Time Traveller, who experiences only a brief encounter. For the original dystopian novel concentrating on a future society in the grips of tyranny one looks to Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908). This was followed by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921, American edition 1924). From a lengthy list of subsequent dystopian works, the best known are Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932), 1984 (George Orwell, 1949), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953), and The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985). Each utilizes a speculative scheme of future history with no necessary connection to the present, thus - 16 -
passing beyond the general investigative preconditions of the present essay. These works nevertheless warn us of the dangers of authoritarian repression, sometimes accepted in conscious choice—a future somehow gone wrong—and that field is ripe for exploration. There is now quite a variety of novels exploring alternatives to actual history, usually charting a course from recognized reality into the altered situation. It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis was perhaps the first such work. More recently, the rewriting of World War II is a favorite task, involving drastic alterations of the outcome of the war and observations on the nature and effect of authoritarian government. Such efforts in fiction are well characterized as “alternative history.” Making History (Stephen Fry, 1996) chronicles a scientific undertaking involving traveling back in time and using chemical means to prevent Hitler’s birth from occurring, ultimately with dire and grotesque consequences. The Plot Against America (Philip Roth, 2004) speculates about a Lindbergh presidency and its possible role in introducing institutionalized antisemitism into America. The number of interesting examples of alternative history could be multiplied many times over. Alternative history has even found some theoretical grounding. Recently an impressive group of historical scholars contributed to a volume entitled Virtual History. These essays each consider a premise, for example, what if there had been no American Revolution? Each counterfactual brings with it further counterfactuals, both before and after the fact—what conditions could have averted the American Revolution? would certain subsequent developments still have taken place? Such counterfactual scenarios “are simulations based on calculations of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world” 45 and as such can be profitably studied.46 Perhaps literature can draw benefit from such study.
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Fantasy History In all good conscience one must step beyond alternative history, however, and conceive of a broad category, fantasy history. Sometimes alternative history is described as fantasy history, but there are pressing reasons for making some clear distinctions. Fantasy history does not require precise counterfactuals to explore, since the departure from perceived reality is often self-impelled. In many works, the historical landscape is altered not so much in order to describe the changed scene and attendant course of events or attendant life circumstances, but to facilitate points being made about reality, whether present or past. Alternative history is an adventure. Fantasy history by contrast is often an exploration. Alternative history and dystopia can reasonably be described as genres, the representatives of which sometimes can be subsumed in the category of fantasy history. Other works in that category may fit entirely different genre definitions. Is fantasy history perhaps too broad a category to be of genuine use? By no means. Many books may appear at first sight to claim membership in this category, but fail elementary tests. They may simply belong in the categories of adventure, fantasy, or children’s literature: to accept fantasy history as a useful category, one must agree to distinguish it from lesser categories. We already undertake such distinctions for historical fiction, if we follow the advice of Manzoni—quoted above—regarding a historical presentation that would pass muster with those actually living in the period that is involved. The great novels of Dumas meet that requirement in basic terms and indeed seek to contribute beyond the call of duty. To describe them as romance or adventure tends to detract from their true character and merit. They meet criteria for serious historical fiction. The criteria for fantasy history have likewise to do with an abiding purpose and the manner of its realization. The book will be solidly rooted in a historical past, or present, or near future, and will develop a fantasy designed to illuminate past or present.
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Fantasy history can already claim at least one certifiable classic. The most impressive literary candidate for this category is probably The Master and Margarita (1931–40, published posthumously in 1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov. One can accept that it is structured as a Menippean satire, as is often asserted,47 to judge especially from the upside-down order of things. Yet the book very clearly fulfills the condition of being grounded in reality: this is established in several of the early chapters, where typical scenes in Moscow of the 1930s are set. The fiction then places the underlying reality—namely the all-pervasive authoritarian repression that is barely even alluded to—in stark relief: a prominence through absence. In short, the manifestation of Satan in the guise of Professor Woland seems almost unremarkable in such a setting, given the Stalinist purges and denunciations that seemed never to cease in the Soviet Union of that era. Interwoven with the activity of Woland and his demonic band is the story of the Crucifixion rewritten from an atheist perspective: this seems to demonstrate the importance of history (versus religion) to the book’s conception. A lurid Satan’s ball is based on a voluptuous American embassy party actually held in 1935, though with a vastly different guest list which included the author: one might see in this conjunction the international circumstances—the rivalry of political systems, and was either rival worthy of esteem?—that lay behind the suffering of so many Soviet citizens during this period. The events more often than not are supernatural, increasingly so (if that were possible) as the book progresses, but they suggest the trauma of society. The essential message throughout is that no end to this appalling state of affairs can be envisaged—and that message even applies to any salutary effect the novel might possibly have, for Bulgakov entertained no hope whatsoever of seeing it into print. A less obvious but just as eminent candidate has already been introduced. I mentioned Mme de la Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves as an outlier in the development of historical fiction, for this seventeenth-century work is very like nineteenth-century historical novels in its conscious production of histo-
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rical context. For reasons far from clear, however, the central character of Mme de Clèves is not historical. We saw that Mme de la Fayette’s circle of friends included a great-granddaughter of Duke Jacques of Nemours, who is the male protagonist of the book. In general, the members of this circle would have read of Duke Jacques’ appalling treatment of Françoise de Rohan, a cause célèbre of the later sixteenth century. They would have been aware, moreover, that Duke Jacques’ stepson Duke Henri of Guise was married to Catherine de Clèves—from whom the heroine’s surname seems to derive, and who remarkably enough became a key figure in Dumas’ Henri III et sa cour, which revolves around the assassination of her admirer by order of Duke Henri. With these facts well in view, 48 they would have asked the question: why has the author produced so many interesting historical details, yet altered the most crucial information in so peculiar a manner? Part of the answer springs from the page: the novel’s heroine enacts the role of a woman left largely unmolested by the men with whom she is involved, unlike so often in real life. This in itself may justify the fantasy. Yet scholarship on La princesse de Clèves is deep and extensive, and I do not wish to press here a particular interpretation. The fantasy should challenge the reader to imagine the likelihood of various possibilities raised by current problems and project the conceivable course of humanity from that point forward. If the forward course remains nebulous in La princesse de Clèves, three novels fulfill that condition in a very basic way: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Nevill Shute’s On the Beach (1957), and John Feffer’s recent Splinterlands (2016). Admittedly each develops a postapocalyptic theme, producing a strong sense of commonality with dystopia and (to some extent) alternative history. A distinguishing characteristic is the grounding in real experience: the appalling circumstances addressed in these novels might rapidly proceed from the present that the reader well knows. Rapid decline is both the raison d’être and the admonitory message of the book by Feffer, who in an interview has described it strictly as dystopia. 49 The
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narrative is anchored formally to the present through a distinct concatenation, however, and one should argue accordingly that Splinterlands is a more general exercise in fantasy history. Its admonitory message concerns the potential of climate change to undermine the health of political systems. A reasonable candidate for inclusion in the category of fantasy history is Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand. Indeed, this classification might lend a certain literary legitimacy to a work sometimes disparaged for its advancement of extreme libertarian ideology. The criteria seem well met. The novel is grounded in reality, albeit a reality that is slowly becoming unhinged. The fantasy, whereby talented capitalists are spirited away to safety by the mysterious John Galt as a form of “strike against those who would strike,” is full blown and purports to comment on human progress. The verdict has not been reached on whether that comment has validity, however, and in certain ways this book trips over its own feet. Its theme of railroad capitalism is drawn directly from Garet Garrett’s heroic-capitalist novel The Driver of 1922, where brilliant investor William M. Galt restores a mighty railroad to prominence. One wonders in turn whether either book is connected with William Galt, the nom de plume of the author—Luigi Natoli—of an Italian historical novel, I Beati Paoli (1915), intimately tied to Sicilian Mafia culture, but in ways that remain thoroughly mysterious.50 A connection with the Scottish novelist and entrepreneur John Galt (1779–1839) 51 would have been limited to Ayn Rand simply having heard that name. Even so, Atlas Shrugged is a considerable work, and it claims literary legitimacy under the fantasy history umbrella. Other well-known novels with a claim to membership in this category include The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus, a nightmare fantasia without a basis in recorded history. Its extreme scenario—rampant bubonic plague in a modern city—is a stage on which the variety of human behavior can be enacted and closely observed, with the possibility of implications for philosophy. Whether as a metaphor for the perils of societal complacency or as a symbolic parallel - 21 -
to the coming of fascism, the plague undoubtedly plays an admonitory role in the book. Julien Gracq’s Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951, English translation titled The Opposing Shore) leans towards surrealism, but begs inclusion in the fantasy history category with its imaginary countries in a continuous state of estrangement and impending hostility. A credible extension of the author’s reality, the fantasy is pursued at length for the purpose of reflecting back on that reality. David Foster Wallace’s widely studied Infinite Jest (1996) suffers from an absence of clarity in the relative roles of the present and the fantasy. A gargantuan and labyrinthine work, it allegedly is “cruel to its readers, but for the readers’ own good.”52 Whether the fantasy history category can be usefully applied must be left undecided here, although the basic concept of the book allows that it has a place. The inclusion of Philip Winsor’s Restoration (2002) needs little explanation. In the author’s own words, this novel brings together “outstanding and discordant elements of the last century, the graces and attainments of the period blended with its hideousnesses and incongruities.” The cast of characters develops from real-life examples, “some who were admirable because they tried to make new lives for themselves and left the past behind, others who seemed pitiful and trivial because their lives were dedicated to reclaiming a long dead past.” The story of these characters and their imaginary patria advances in a matrix of tightly worked tension. The conclusion leaves the reader musing over the relative merits of constitutional monarchy and republican democracy. While Restoration may be assigned to a fantasia genre, Winsor’s Into Exile is decidedly a psychological thriller. As a precondition thereof, one never senses a departure from the domain of the real present, near future, or recent past. The underlying fantasy concerns American policy towards Vierwinden, a fictional Caribbean island. In some instances the fantasy is supplied from genuine but unrelated historical events. Cold War spy recruitment is grafted onto the protagonist’s Harvard scene and the development of the character of - 22 -
the “Guy,” a malign void and would-be apparatchik, who seeks cover from conventional surroundings while recruiting for a secret subversive movement: the organization he serves is a techno-fascist amalgam of the “Ben Carson meets Sovereign Citizens and QAnon” variety; it aim to penetrate the intellectual core of national existence. The Guy’s dogged determination is attributable to his enormous satisfaction in the rewards, thus a desire to fill the void. One thinks of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” proposition. Dom, who provides much of the story as first person narrator, is by nature suspicious of those who appear to have, or aspire to, an excess of power. He emerges from adolescent introspection to engage in deep-rooted questioning of the condition of society. His development is described to great effect through his own voice. While controversies and questions confronted by Dom bear a strong resemblance to the Snowden matter, the author pays close attention to the evolution of Dom’s character, and this is a fundamental difference. Little is understood of how Snowden’s life course brought him to his moment of decision, other than a general impression of high intelligence coupled with good intentions. The public seems more interested in opinion polls as to whether he did right or wrong. By contrast, Dom early becomes an object of surveillance and is victimized in various ways; it seems almost as though he is targeted because he has a natural inclination to seek out causes and effects. Like Snowden, Dom eventually passes into self-imposed exile and sets in motion the presentation of his extensive evidence of the administration’s involvement in suppression of rights, in surveillance, in mind control, in subversion of foreign governments, and in assassination. The shift of focus to the imaginary Vierwinden, a tiny client state of the U.S., brings into relief the inexorable tendency of fascism towards oppression. It is one of a number of factors that join in a universal message of admonition regarding societal complacency and its natural outcome in authoritarian subversion.
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Into Exile differs moderately from the Snowden matter in terms of its focus: not just surveillance, but suppression of freedom of speech is at issue in a society where, in the later stages of the narrative, authoritarian subversion is taking hold. Yet it must be admitted that freedom of speech came under attack in America soon after the World Trade Center destruction. For anyone who has had their international mail opened in such circumstances, it must still be an issue. There is undoubtedly a frightening aspect here. As the presidential election of 2016 approached, I began to worry that Into Exile’s scenario for secret subversive organizations might correspond to a reality involving perhaps one or another (or even most) of the Republican presidential hopefuls. Later, as our cruel fate sank in—the fate of having a “three-million-vote loser” actually step into the presidency—the book’s predictive power in the Snowden matter began to impress me. And now, as the subversion shows its guises and stratagems daily with ever-increasing clarity, I am drawn to the admonitory message of the book. Our course of social progress may somehow emerge intact from the current predicament, yet even then the message of Into Exile will remain articulate and timely. Nor should it be indispensable to imbibe this year’s Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright in order to prepare effectively against the fascist onslaught, however desirable that may be. Winsor’s book issues the same warning in a simplistic and emotional form, allowing readers to rely on their own imaginative processes in constructing lines of defense and devising strategies of resistance. In Conclusion This inquiry began with Into Exile pigeonholed in the genre speculative fiction and sub-genre alternative history, a classification that obscured its fundamental character as a psychological thriller. The sub-genre was not
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accurate, since the book involves no grand departure from the known course of history, but develops its themes alongside recent known history. More importantly, the book has characteristics suggesting fantasy history as the appropriate broad category, in which works of “alternative history” will not qualify if they are merely adventure and fail to develop a message in clear relation to present circumstances. Whether the “genre of speculative fiction” has anything to contribute to this inquiry is far from clear. Most recently that label has come to denote a “meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory,” defined “not by clear boundaries but by resemblance to prototypical examples.” 53 If the book, through its grounding in reality, finds no “speculative” prototype, then the entire taxonomy must fall by the wayside. This leaves fantasy history as a broad category existing alongside historical fiction. In both categories one observes the endeavor to contribute, through historical approaches, something to the real and known, whether it be the documented past or the experienced present. In both categories, too, one should deny admittance to books that do not aspire to entry. A host of writings might be discussed casually as historical fiction, yet they are merely adventure, romance, or children’s literature. In a similar manner, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–present), from which the blockbuster television series Game of Thrones is drawn, bulges with disarticulated and obfuscated references to known historical circumstances; develops as though it were a history; and even involves imaginary historical chronicles— yet it is fantasy simple, for it has no relevance to reality, unless of course as substitute history.
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1 Luke Harding, The Snowden Files. The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (New York: Vintage, 2014). 2 A paperback publication followed on 21 May 2015: Philip Winsor, Into Exile (State College: Editions Enlaplage). 3 U.N. Resolution 68/167: “The right to privacy in the digital age.” 4 Morgan Robertson, Futility (New York: Mansfield, 1898). 5 Charles Pellegrino, Her Name, Titanic: The Untold Story of the Sinking and Finding of the Unsinkable Ship (New York: Avon, 1990), 53–4, unconfirmed and in all likelihood apocryphal. 6 Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War. A Novel of North Vietnam (New York: Riverhead, 1996; first Vietnamese publication 1991). 7 Thus Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1981), and Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Penguin History of the Church 1; Harmondsworth, 1967). 8 Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Dell, 1983). The original title of the English publication (1982) is The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. 9 Another extraordinary forerunner of the historical novel from the same period is Guy Allard, Zizimi, Prince Ottoman, amoureux de Philipine Helene de Sassenage. Histoire dauphinoise (Grenoble, 1673). Further French titles in early historical fiction are listed in Gustave Dulong, L’abbé de Saint-Réal: étude sur les rapports de l’histoire et du roman au XVIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris: Champion, 1921), I, 331–3. 10 In the author’s own words, “Et surtout ce que j’y trouve, c’est une parfaite imitation du monde de la Cour et de la manière dont on y vit,” quoted by Pierre Malandain, “Ecriture de l’histoire dans la Princesse de Clèves,” Littérature, no. 36, 1979 (Sémiotiques du roman), 20. 11 Robert Oresko, “Maria Giovanna Battista of Savoy-Nemours (1644–1724): Daughter, Consort, and Regent of Savoy,” in Queenship in Europe 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 16–55.
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12 Alphonse Baron de Ruble, Le duc de Nemours et Mademoiselle de Rohan (1531– 1592) (Paris, 1883). 13 Accordingly, Valentine Poizat, La véritable princesse de Clèves (Paris, La Renaissance du livre, 1920), presented Anna of Este as the model for Mme de Clèves. Too many obvious counterarguments present themselves for this notion to hold weight. 14 Her research included a self-effacing inquiry with Scott for information on Perkin Warbeck; see Lidia Garbin, “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck: Walter Scott in the Writings of Mary Shelley,” Romanticism on the Net, issue 6, May 1997. Mary Shelley remains in the throes of recognition and is omitted from Brian Hamnett, The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011). 15 Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel (Del romanzo storico), trans. Sandra Bermann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 125. 16 Alfred de Vigny, “Reflexions sur la vérité dans l’art,” in Cinq Mars, ou un conjuration sous Louis XIII (Paris, 1891), 1–10. 17 And yet this case is an anomaly, since the key source, Gatien Courtilz de Sandras’ rambling Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan (1700), is a semi-fictional first-person narrative where the relevant factual content is hearsay. It can be emphasized that the third and by far largest part of Dumas’ d’Artagnan series, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus tard (1847–50), is above all a depiction of Louis XIV in the 1660s, a subject Dumas had studied comprehensively in preparing a historical work entitled Louis XIV et son siècle (1844–5). 18 The pamphleteer Eugène de Mirecourt (an alias) received fifteen days in prison and publication of his sentence in the newspapers. André Maurois, Les trois Dumas (2 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1954), I, 192–8. 19 Jacques Chirac, “Discours prononcé lors du transfert des cendres d’Alexandre Dumas au Panthéon,” 30 novembre 2002. 20 As exemplified by Gustave Simon, Histoire d’une collaboration. Alexandre Dumas et Auguste Maquet (Paris: Crès, 1919). Bernard Fillaire, Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet et associés. Essai (2d ed., Paris: Bartillat, 2010), pleads for
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Maquet’s co-authorship, without considering the counter proposition, that the novels were wholly organized, guided and finished by Dumas. 21 William M. Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1997), 59, finds La princesse de Clèves and Mme de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) to be trendsetters for social conduct in the period in question. 22 The Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas (père), trans. A. F. Davidson (2 vols., London: W. H. Allen, 1891), II, 218. 23 Thus Irene Harrison Smith, “A Comparative Study of Alexandre Dumas Pere’s Henri III et sa cour and Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme” (M.A. thesis, Atlanta University, 1968), 19. 24 Prosper Mérimée’s novel Chronique du règne de Charles IX, with its evasive treatment of the massacre, emerged a few days after Dumas’ drama premiered. 25 David R. Slavitt, The Duke’s Man. A Novel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 50. 26 As n. 21 above. 27 Thuana, sive excerpta ex ore Jac. Aug. Thuani (Paris, 1669), 20–1. Antoine de la Roche d’Anglerais, alias Chicot, is treated by Edmond Gautier, Histoire du donjon de Loches (Châteauroux, 1886), 173–7, Jules Mathorez, Histoire de Chicot, bouffon de Henri III (Paris, 1914, extract from Bulletin du Bibliophile), and Richard Hillman, “(Im)politic Jesting: Lear’s Fool—and Henri III’s,” Theta X, Théâtre Tudor, 2011, 203–216. 28 As n. 21 above. 29 Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires et discours, ed. Eliane Viennot (Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2004), 92–6. 30 Jacques Levron, La véritable histoire de la dame de Montsoreau (Angers, 1938). This work remains a fanciful demi-history. 31 André Joubert, Louis de Clermont, sieur de Bussy d’Amboise, gouverneur d’Anjou (Angers-Paris, 1885). 32 Much more relating to the duke of Anjou’s character is presented in the sequel, Les quarante-cinq (1847), as Diane de Méridor wreaks her vengeance on him.
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33 This ostensibly is the subject matter of Slavitt’s “novel” (as n. 24 above), where there is the worthwhile conjecture that Monsoreau’s wife threw herself at Bussy on account of her husband’s habitual brutality. 34 Nicolas Le Roux, La faveur du roi: mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois (Seyssel: Champs Vallon, 2000), 210. The king’s friendship for Quélus and Maugiron, both fallen in the duel of the mignons, was legendary. 35 Antraguet was fairly widely reported as a womanizer, and while there is no clear corroboration of his liaison with Guise’s sister Catherine, Pierre de l’Estoile preserves a satire in which Catherine described herself thus: “My body has no other desires than lubricity and folly, and my mind is solely devoted to diabolic designs and plots.” Antónia Szabari, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2010), 202. 36 Doran, The History of Court Fools (London, 1858), 281–8. 37 Katherine Crawford, “From Reception to Assassination: French Negotiations of ‘Platonic Love’,” in Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France, ed. Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin (London-New York: Routledge, 2016), 130. 38 Herbert Gorman, The Incredible Marquis, Alexandre Dumas (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1929), 316. 39 Harold Orel, Victorian Literary Critics (London-Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 25, speaks of “pandering to the insatiable craving for amusement at the expense of art” in reference to Maquet’s play Valeria of 1851. 40 The duke’s departure through a second-floor window occurred in February 1578 and is recounted e.g. in Léo Mouton, Bussy d’Amboise et Madame de Montsoreau, d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Hachette, 1912), 171–5. Catherine journeyed to the duke in May, but they met in a village some distance from Angers; see Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 100. 41 Cf. F. W. J. Hemmings, The King of Romance. A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), 117–18. 42 James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 10–11.
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43 This must also probably be said of the historical fiction of two younger and otherwise exceptional British authors: Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. 44 Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library (2d. ed., 3 vols., London: Smith, Elder, 1892), III, 56: “I have no doubt that ‘Hypatia’ is fundamentally and hopelessly inaccurate, and that a sound historian would shudder at innumerable anachronisms.” 45 Niall Ferguson, “Introduction,” in id. (ed.), Virtual History. Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Fall River, 2009, first published in 1997), 85. 46 Several distinguished books of the “If Only” school are noted by Ian Morris, “The Opium War and the Humiliation of China,” New York Times Book Review, July 2, 2018. They deal with the Opium War, the acceptance of slavery in colonial Virginia, and the participation of Britain in World War I. 47 Most effectively by Ellendea Proffer, “Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: Genre and Motif,” in The Master and Margarita: A Critical Companion, ed. Laura D. Weeks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 98–100. 48 Janet Letts, Legendary Lives in La princesse de Cleves (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1998), 60, sees the general readership’s awareness of recent French history as considerable and includes the following words of Mme de Sévigné (at 44): “We are reading the history of France [...]. I want to get it straight at least as much as Roman history, in which I have neither relatives nor friends; at least here you find names you know.” 49 Mark Karlin in Truthout: https://truthout.org/articles/are-we-standing-on-theprecipice-of-a-dystopian-world/, published March 26, 2017. 50 Very little exists in English on this theme. Daragh O’Connell, “Mafia and Antimafia: Sciascia and Borsellino in Vincenzo Consolo’s Lo spasimo di Palermo,” in Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy. Transformations in Society and Culture, ed. Stephen Gundle and Lucia Rinaldi (New York-Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 133, 135, 138, alludes to the Beati Paoli as dispensing summary justice in Palermo of lore, but is unable to suggest background material other than Natoli’s novel.
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51 John Galt could have been addressed earlier here in the context of Sir Walter Scott. At least one of his works must be called a historical novel: Ringan Gilhaize, or The Covenanters (1823). 52 Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 120. 53 Marek Oziewicz, “Speculative Fiction,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature, http://literature. oxfordre.com, online publication date: March 2017.
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