I wonder what Henry James would say to Toni Morrison
by Austin Ratner

Having spent seven years researching, writing, and, at last, triumphantly publishing a historical novel, I was dismayed to learn from Denis Donoghue’s essay in APS 8 that Henry James considered historical novels “fatally cheap.” Cheapness is clearly bad, and fatality worse; beyond that I’m not exactly sure what Henry James meant since I haven’t yet developed the stamina to read all the way to the end of one of Henry James’s sentences.

Yet, if historical fiction means a realist fictional work whose setting predates its author, then this category of fiction certainly belongs to a venerable tradition. War and Peace meets that criterion; so does The Red Badge of Courage. Shakespeare created many historical fictions and even the King David stories of the Hebrew Bible represent, as Robert Alter puts it, “the imaginative reenactment of history by a gifted writer who organizes his materials along certain thematic biases and according to his own remarkable intuition of the psychology of the characters.”

What matters is not whether a novel or story’s setting precedes the date of writing, but whether the writer’s research into setting has upset the balance of narrative elements so that structure, character, etcetera become subordinate to large hair balls of superfluous detail—or, conversely, whether the writer’s failure to research into setting has left the setting unpersuasive and overly schematic so that nothing comes to life.

David Potter’s short story “Dr. Kreutzer,” which appears in APS 10, is a superb example of historical fiction writing that persuades with authoritative details while keeping them subservient to story and character. By revisiting four different periods of a German doctor’s life in reverse order, Potter unwinds his subject layer by layer: from Kreutzer’s present-day life as a retired physician and connoisseur of orchids, back to a liaison with a patient in the 1980s in the red-light district of Düsseldorf, back farther to his escape from 1960s East Berlin and the GDR-perverted life of the hospital there, to ultimate origins: his conscription into the German army at the age of fourteen during World War II and his life as a refugee from the brutal Russian conquerors.

By returning to each plotline again and again in an elegantly wreathed fugue, Potter depicts chronology but also suspends time. Dr. Kreutzer’s experience is never over, psychologically speaking. As Sigmund Freud put it, “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish,” and Freud compared the mind to Rome, the Eternal City, which incorporates every stage of its architectural past into its present forms. If fiction is specially equipped to excavate this Eternal City of character and experience—to show the history of how a person starts at one point, is reshaped by experience, and ends at another, full of memory—then all fiction is, in a sense, historical. Good historical fiction merely supplements this excavation of individual character with a mirror inquiry into our past as a people and a species. Tolstoy’s first historical effort was not War and Peace, but the self-inquiry Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. I believe the later work is in some ways just a more ambitious version of the earlier one.

Good historical fiction has important social functions, as well. “Dr. Kreutzer” follows W. G. Sebald in seeing World War II and its aftermath afresh with sympathy for the average German. Like Toni Morrison’s Beloved (perhaps the best historical fiction in recent memory) Potter revisits received truths through a different perspective—that of the victim. After the victors write the first drafts of history, artists must later imagine for us the voices of those that history silenced. Sometimes the victims are casualties of war, sometimes of disaster, and sometimes merely of childhood, a time when much is heard and felt but less is spoken or understood. Good historical fiction reaches backward in time and provides a voice to the mute. That’s why, I believe, Toni Morrison filled her Pulitzer-winning novel with bits in mouths and other imagery of muteness and speech.

I wonder what Henry James would say to Toni Morrison. Only a fiction-writer could say for sure. If it were my scene, I’d have Toni point out to Henry that if you just wait long enough, everything’s historical. All of Henry James’s novels are historical now. If you write long enough (seven years, for instance) what you write may be historical before you’re even done. And I will have the last prolix Jamesian words on this matter, since Henry James, alas, is, if not fatally cheap, fatally dead.