Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

In April’s blog I argued that historical fiction can be more than just costume-drama escapism – that it has the potential to tell us as much about our here-and-now as any novel with a contemporary setting. It can do this because it treats the past as present in the experiences of its characters. It strives to enter into the otherness of the past. It thereby broadens our minds, enabling us to glimpse, refracted in the past, aspects of our present that may be hidden from myopically “contemporary” points-of-view.

In May’s blog, I developed these thoughts by citing philosopher Michel Serres’ arguments against narcissistic presentism. Serres is against an idea of Progress that sees the past entirely from the perspective of its culmination in the present – as something in itself “outdated”, useless except perhaps a source of escapist entertainment, safely to be tossed into the “dustbin of history”. . .

At the end of that blog, I promised to draw on the historian of comparative religion (and novelist) Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Like Serres, Eliade is concerned with alternatives to the modern view of history as a linear and irreversible process. In particular, he points to the potency down the millennia of (to quote the title of his book on the subject) The Myth of the Eternal Return. In archaic societies, he argues, people came to questions of existence and history with a completely different mindset from that of Westernized modernity: they regarded existence and history not as linear and irreversible, but as cyclical. Rituals linked to the solar and lunar cycles shaped their worldview. The participants in rites of New Year or Spring weren’t just commemorating some past event, but playing out as lived experience a view of life as an eternal and always-present cycle of death and renewal.

Eliade goes on to describe how this existential idea of eternal recurrence later came to be historicized into cosmological views of the universe as going through vast, endlessly repeating cycles of birth, destruction and rebirth – an idea that we find, in various forms, in the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, in ancient Indian thought (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain) and in the Stoicism and Neo-Pythagoreanism that dominated Roman thought until the triumph of Christianity.

Eliade highlights how Judaism and Christianity changed the picture completely. History became not a repeating cycle, but a one-off event, born from a unique act of creation and moving unidirectionally towards a definitive Apocalypse. Like the career of an individual soul in the Judeo-Christian view (and by contrast to ideas of reincarnation held in Indian and Greek (Pythagorean) traditions), the life of the cosmos is once-and-for-all, never to be repeated and book-ended by changeless eternities.

Stated in those blunt terms, it’s a bleak and forbidding picture. As a result, as Eliade points out, within Christianity there have always been tendencies that have attempted to soften it by harking back to the archaic rhythms of return and recurrence. The seasonal cycle of the church year, the repetition of rites (above all, the Eucharist), the unchanging daily round of monastic regimes – all these express people’s desire to liberate themselves, through ritual and repetition, from the onward, once-and-for-all rush of history.

As Eliade also points out, the past two or hundred years have seen the Judea-Christian vision of History (linear, unidirectional, a one-off event) reappear in secular clothing – as Victorian faith in Progress, as Marxist faith in the inevitability of revolution and communism, as modern-day liberal “progressivism” etc.

But powerful elements in our psyches, in our cultures, resist these attempts to historicise our entire existence, to turn each of us into bit-parts in the all-encompassing drama of History. The repetitions of sport or art serve this function of liberating us from history. Though they clearly differ in their details, every game of soccer or baseball is in some respects – because the rules stay the same – a repetition of every other game of soccer or baseball, just as there is an element of repetition in every production of Romeo and Juliet, no matter how wacky or experimental. In the case of film, of course, the repetition is front-and-centre.

In the case of literature, repetition is created by writing, and further amplified by printing – and, more recently, by digital reproduction. Writing enables language to step outside its own time and speak to the ages: the past becomes present. This is recognised in our linguistic conventions: notice how, in summarising Mircea Eliade’s views above, I constantly had recourse to the present tense (“Eliade highlights. . . Eliade points out” etc) despite the fact that Eliade died more than forty years ago. When we write a synopsis of a novel, the convention is to use the present tense (even if, of course, the novel itself is (note the present tense!) written in the past tense). Eliade may have died, but through writing his words “speak” to us in the present. “[There are] two essential facts about a work of art,” writes critic Northrop Frye, “that it is contemporary with its own time and that it is contemporary with ours.”

All this is true of any fiction: in this sense, any work of fiction is an attempt at liberation from History. But perhaps, paradoxically, it’s most true of historical fiction. (Or perhaps all this is just a way of saying that all fiction is in essence historical. . . ) For in addition to the repeatability (of reading) inherent in all writing, historical fiction has another level of repetition, another mode of cyclical escape from History: it presents the past, even the distant past, as a lived, immediate experience of its characters (whether or not, grammatically, it is written in the present tense). It jumps about across the straight, unilinear trajectory of the predominant Judeo-Christian tradition – it burrows back, it loops forward, it creates wormholes. . .