Though there can be no one metric for success, historical novels have not only sold well for decades, but also garnered far more critical acclaim than their zeitgeisty peers. In a new history of recent historical fiction, Writing Backwards, Alexander Manshel argues that since the 1980s, literary institutions have privileged the “aesthetic, pedagogical, and political value of the historical past,” something borne out on college syllabi and in major American literary prizes, with “novels set in the past comprising nearly three-quarters of all shortlisted novels between 2000 and 2019.” At least half of the past dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, by my count, could be called historical novels. Today, the historical novel may be the dominant form of literary production, exceeding the small clutch of more “innovative” work in footprint. Only its theory lags behind the present.
In her essay, Smith writes that she came around on historical fiction once she understood its power to “radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present.” The idea of communication between “now” and “back then” is at the heart of the historical novel’s proposed value: that we read the past in order to understand the present. By taking liberties with the material, the historical novel can show us what the hard stuff (history proper) can only intimate; the evocation of “what life was like” becomes an exemplary contrast to our own lives, or else the record can be corrected, and a greater emphasis can be given to subjects and people traditionally overlooked. How far we’ve come, how far we have left to go. Otherwise, costume prevails, and time travel in the novel is merely an escapist fantasy. Something pedagogical, even moral, is at the heart of this perspective — it’s the same sentiment behind the claim that reading fiction makes us better, more empathetic people.
Whether or not one agrees with this commonplace, how exactly might the historical novel “transform” a reader’s perspective? There is a long tradition of Marxist thinking on the subject, and The Historical Novel is widely considered to be the starting point. For Lukács, the classic historical novel emerges in the period following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, amid “the awakening of national sensibility and with it a feeling and understanding for national history.” Beginning with a reading of Sir Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory of the historical novel lays out its typical characteristics, including a panoramic view of the society it depicts, and, borrowing from Hegel, the appearance of “world-historical individuals” — celebrities of the past that the reader may already know — as minor characters. In War and Peace, for instance, the “real” Napoleon appears in front of the “fictional” Andrei Bolkonsky in the aftermath of the battle of Austerlitz. For Lukács, the “great men” of history are too heroic to be ideal protagonists: “The proper hero here is life itself.” An everyman doesn’t get in the way of history’s sweep; his “relative lack of contour” lets him be a vessel for the disparate feelings and forces of the period.