Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

Why write historical fiction? In last month’s blog, I suggested that historical fiction can afford us unique insights into the present through its intertwining of modernity (immediacy, the present) and historicity (“pastness”): historical fiction reflects both the ways in which the past was modern for those who experienced it, and also the ways in which the past is continuously present in the present (the operation of Karma, as a Buddhist would say). In future blogs, I’ll explore how this mingling of modernity and historicity can actually play out in the writing of historical fiction. (As I mentioned in last month’s blog, these reflections are of more than just academic interest for me – I’m currently writing an (ancient) historical novel myself.) For now, I want to argue that the writing of historical fiction has another, wider significance.

Two writers serve as my guides: the philosopher Michel Serres and the historian of mythology and religion Mircea Eliade. Serres is important not least for the way he defied the compartmentalization of academia: he was both a philosopher of modern-day science and technology and also a classicist (he wrote notably, for example, about the Greek and Roman atomists, Democritus and Lucretius). What’s more, he regarded these seemingly diverse interests not just as distinct items in an eclectic portfolio career, but as intimately connected. In his Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (1990) he gives a simple but vivid example of the presence of the past in the present (its “presentness” – what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead would call the “objective immortality” of everything that occurs):

What things are contemporary? Consider a late-model car. It is a disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods. One can date it component by component: this part was invented at the turn of the century, another, ten years ago, and Carnot’s cycle is almost two hundred years old. Not to mention that the wheel dates back to neolithic times. The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its finish, sometimes only by the slickness of the advertising surrounding it.

(Granted that Serres was speaking/writing in 1990, before the changes in car-technology brought about by electrification, computerization and AI – but his essential point remains.)

On the other side of the equation, he is equally insistent and persuasive on the paradoxical idea that we should regard authors even from the distant past as our contemporaries. Lucretius, writing in Latin in the first century BC (De Rerum Natura – “On the Nature of the Universe”) was not merely putting forward a primitive, outmoded version of modern atomic theory that has been superseded and can be consigned to the dusty shelves of the archives:

He’s talking about fluid mechanics, about turbulence and chaos. . . He’s asking questions about chance and determinism. . . He is truly contemporary, not only in his scientific content but in his philosophic reflection. Even more contemporary because he is passionately interested in questions of violence, in the relations between religion and science, and so, suddenly very much more up-to-date than the horrible mass of books that claim to be the latest word on these problems, in a vocabulary that is conscientiously “contemporary.”

Serres goes on to attack the idea of “progress”:

We conceive of time as an irreversible line, whether interrupted or continuous, of acquisitions and inventions. We go from generalizations to discoveries, leaving behind us a trail of errors finally corrected. . . I cannot help thinking that this idea is the equivalent of those ancient diagrams we laugh at today, which place the Earth at the center of everything, or our galaxy at the middle of the universe, to satisfy our narcissism. Just as in space we situate ourselves at the center, at the navel of things in the universe, so for time, through progress, we never cease to be at the summit, on the cutting edge, at the state-of-the-art of development. It follows that we are always right, for the simple, banal, and naïve reason that we are living in the present moment. . . This diagram allows us to be not only right but to be righter than was ever possible before. Now I believe that one should always be wary of any person or theory that is always right: he’s not plausible; it’s not probable.

The narcissistic presentism that Serres identifies is part of the cultural air we breathe. It begins with childlike bedazzlement by the latest consumer gadgetry, and ends in the dangerous idea that humanity’s salvation is to be found in technological progress, rather than in the orientation and movement of human hearts and minds. (Here I find myself drawn to that most ancient, outmoded and un-present of words/concepts: soul.) As Serres brings out so well in his conversations, the present’s attitude of condescension or scorn towards the past represents not just a limitation on thought and imagination, but a dangerous illusion. The writer of historical fiction, by contrast, challenges the absolute distinction between past and present. Through making the past present, through taking it seriously as present, through respecting it, s/he loosens, just a bit, the vice-like grip that narcissistic presentism has on our minds. That is a goal worth pursuing.

In June’s blog, I’ll draw this line of thought out further with the help of Mircea Eliade’s idea of the eternal return. . .