The paradox of writing the dead: Voice, empathy and authenticity in historical biofictions
Catherine Padmore explores the challenges of writing historical fiction, addressing concepts of authenticity and voice and discussing the relationships between the historical figure and its (non)fictional construction, the author, and the reader.
Abstract
In the 1980s, Stephen Greenblatt wrote his famous phrase,
“I began with the desire to speak with the dead” (1988: 1). While Greenblatt’s
motives and methods are different to my own, the same desire inspires my
work-in-progress: a novel about the life and death of Amy Dudley (1532-1560).
Her husband was Robert Dudley, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth I and widely
rumoured to have been her lover. Amy was found dead at the base of a stairwell,
with speculations including murder, suicide, illness or accident. Writing this
dead woman is an attempt to raise her up and let her speak, all the while
knowing this is an impossible task. It requires the dangerous assumption of
empathy between bodies dislocated in time and place, and it risks inserting my
voice into the space where Amy’s used to be. Contextualizing this example
alongside other fiction, biography and wider scholarship, I assert that it is
both possible and impossible to write the dead, that to write historical
biofiction is to hold opposing ideas together, to let the impossible be.
Despite risks and paradoxes, this paper argues that we can write the dead and,
further, that we should, for who else will speak for them now?
Keywords: biofiction; biographical fiction;
historical fiction; Amy Dudley; Amy Robsart; voice; authenticity; empathy;
writing women.
In 1550 Amy Robsart married Robert
Dudley, who later became the favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1560 Amy’s body
was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs. A great scandal erupted, with
gossip raging in England and on the continent about how she met her end. Had
she taken her own life? Was she murdered to clear Dudley’s path to the throne?
Was it a terrible accident? When Amy appears in fictional works, this dramatic
death is often her narrative reason-for-being; either that, or she is the
inconvenient obstacle preventing a relationship between Dudley and the queen.[1] Very few portrayals seem interested in rendering the mysteries or textures of
her inner world. The lacuna is for me the most compelling aspect of this
historical moment, which I am addressing in a novel based on the last months of
Amy’s life.
Throughout the writing process, Amy’s
two extant letters have been frequent touchstones.[2] In one comes a plaintive statement of
her feelings after her husband’s departure: “I not beyng all to gether in quyet
for his soden departyng” (transcribed in Jackson 1878: 57). When elsewhere Amy
writes “undarstand”, “fryndshyppe” and “trobelyng”, historian Chris Skidmore wonders if
her spelling is phonetic, giving readers an echo of her regional Norfolk accent
(Skidmore 2010: 53). This is a likely conclusion, given the lack of standardized
spelling at the time, but when I first read the letters, abstract understanding
transformed into something entirely different. Without thought, my mind found
the phonetic resonance that Skidmore describes. I heard the words spoken in the
rhythms and vowels of my grandmother’s voice, clear as if she was sitting beside me and
not long-dead herself. My grandmother was brought up in Norfolk only a few
miles from where Amy lived, and her family had dwelled there for generations.
Bootiful, she used to say. Moosic. A pressure on the vowels, distinct to the region. In that moment—reading Amy’s written words but hearing my grandmother’s voice speak them—I
felt closer than ever before to the narrating subject of my novel, and at the
same time, the furthest away. From then on, Amy’s voice and my nana’s were
inextricably linked—I held both in my mind at the same time. It was Nana. It
was Amy. It was neither. It was both.
I will argue that this flickering
movement between irresolvable opposites is one of many paradoxes that
characterize the experience of writing and reading historical fiction. The Oxford
English Dictionary (2016) defines a “paradox” as: “An argument, based on
(apparently) acceptable premises and using (apparently) valid reasoning, which
leads to a conclusion that is against sense, logically unacceptable, or
self-contradictory”. Discussing some of the multiple paradoxes of voice,
empathy and authenticity in my own and others’ historical fiction, I assert
that it is both possible and impossible to write the dead, that to do so is to
hold opposing ideas together, to let the impossible be.
My manuscript began with a
necrodialogistical desire—to hear the dead speak. I wanted answers to the
many questions I had about Amy’s life and I wanted Amy to tell me them in her
own voice. The concept of “voice” as used here functions both as the actual
spoken or written voice, with its unique timbre and phrasing, and as a synecdoche
for the “self” of the other, a communication of the textures and tones of
another’s body and mind: “that elusive, ever-present stamp of ‘self’ on a text”
(Mulvaney and Jolliffe 2005: 18). I was seeking what Roland Barthes calls the
“grain” of the voice: “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue”
(1978: 182) and “the body in the voice as it sings” (188). Of course
this desire was impossible. Over the centuries between us, Amy’s voice and
persona have been lost in the gaps between scant archival evidence. Nonetheless
I resolved to create a credible and compelling sense of them through fiction,
taking what Janet Burroway describes as “an imaginative leap into the mind and
diction of another person” (2007: 42).
Clearly I am not alone in this
undertaking. Ann Heilman and Mark Llewellyn (2004) remark on the recent numbers
of women choosing to write about historical figures, reinserting into narrative
those lost to or silenced by history. For Jerome de Groot, “the desire to somehow
raise the dead is what brings us to historical fiction” (2015: 20), seeking
what he calls the “sense of the material and the resurrectionary” (de Groot
2015: 21). Margaret Atwood suggests the desire is broader, common to fiction in
general: “All writing is motivated […] to bring something or someone back from
the dead” (2002: 159). But how would this desire play out in the mechanics of
one word after another? How might I come to know this woman from four centuries
past, let alone write her voice in a convincing and emotive way? In what
follows I recount some of the creative processes used to establish a sense of
the material reality of this dead woman. These will be contextualized within
larger debates about historical or biographical fiction, examining the desire
to create narrative empathy and authenticity.
The first process, of course, was
reading. Beyond Amy’s letters, I read other writers from my subject’s era,
listening for their voices in diaries, correspondence and plays, for the flow
of language and choice phrases that evoke a sense of time and place. Novelist
Geraldine Brooks documents her joy at discovering words like “jorum” (a word
used to describe a vessel for coffee during the American Civil War) and
“siling” (a Derbyshire term for heavy rain) (Brooks 2006: 8-9). She “used such
words as seasoning” and “loved finding ones that were more euphonious or
onomatopoeic than their contemporary equivalents” (2006: 9). Supplementing the
primary texts, I read about the larger structures of Amy’s milieu to consider
the turbulence of the Reformation and the intrigues at court that formed the
backdrop to her life. Through reading I amassed a sense of what it might feel
like to inhabit Amy’s world but I craved a more personal connection. When my
novel opens, Amy hasn’t seen her husband in months. She lives in a stranger’s
house near Oxford while her husband attends the queen, with rumours circulating
that the pair are lovers. According to one source, “Lord Robert dyd swyve the
queen” (Rye 1885: 31). How did Amy occupy her days through all this? How did
she feel?
To answer such questions I began to
write a diary from Amy’s perspective, with a nib dipped in ink and dipped again
every few words (since it felt wrong to do this on a computer). I wrote to hear
the impossible voice of the dead woman. It was an act of hopeful ventriloquism,
a projection of her voice through my text, but etymology reminds me that it is
never just about words on a page. In Latin, “venter” means belly and “loqui”
means to speak (OED 2016): this “speaking from the belly” binds Amy’s fictional voice
to a body long buried and rotted and (re)turned to earth. A body now absent—she was supposedly buried beneath the floor of an Oxford church, which has
since been excavated, yet no trace of her skeleton was found (Aird 1956: 78).
In the diary I wrote to recover this body—what it had known and felt. Out of
necessity I used the experiences of my own body to stand in for Amy’s,
translated in time and space. Into Amy’s world I wrote memories of childhood
walks in England, running through summer bracken and catching dusty spores in
my throat. I wrote of the fog that wreathed past my room at a writers’ retreat
in the Australian Blue Mountains and budburst in the hills north-east of
Melbourne. The sad cheep of a dying chick cupped in a friend’s palms. An
orphaned lamb, hand-reared by another friend, which followed her like a dog.
Such small daily occurrences I gave to Amy, to see what she might make of them,
what they might mean to her. These were conscious inclusions in the manuscript.
Others were unintentional and surprising. Reading it back after the birth of my
first child I heard within it the unspoken voice of my own body in the
preceding years—Amy had my yearning to feel the weight of a child within her
belly. Like me she longed to hold the hand of my father, now dead; to stride
again in crisp air through fields near her birthplace.
When I travelled back to England to
research the novel, I was drawn to my subject’s places, like the biographer
Richard Holmes retracing the footsteps of Stevenson and Shelley: “My urge was
to go directly to the original materials – and most especially to the places
– for myself” (Holmes 2005: 136, original italics). He writes of this
process as “a continuous living dialogue between the two [biographer and
subject] as they move over the same historical ground […] It is fictional,
imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally talk back;
but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can”
(Holmes 2005: 66). So I walked where I suspected Amy had. I paced the graveyard
of Cumnor church, measuring out the dimensions of the long-demolished house
where she spent her last months. Which way would the sun rise? What might she
have seen from her upstairs window? I sat on a cold pew in the village church,
hearing the vicar’s frail voice and trying to imagine a world where God was in
everything. My fingers traced graffiti etched four centuries ago. I walked up
Cumnor Hurst, feeling the hillcrest in my thighs. I was especially careful
descending stairs. For Preeta Samarasan, such places and objects function as
writers’ “tools to carry them across vast chronological or geographical
distance” (2007: 214). In this way, writers seek an impossible proximity with
the dead subject. At one stage in his journey, Holmes has the “feeling that
Stevenson was actually waiting” for him “in person. It was almost like a
hallucination” (2005: 26). At times in England I too felt Amy was beside me,
that if I turned my head quickly enough I would see her and she would start to
speak.
Novelist Arnold Zable describes a
further step taken during his research for the novel Scraps of Heaven, when
he merges with his characters:
No matter how
much detail the writer accumulates, there comes a point when he must enter the
time and place he is depicting, and into the minds and shoes of the characters,
and allow them to take him into the unknown (Zable 2005: 10).
According to Gillian Polack this
internalization of characters and their historical context is necessary so that
these might provide “the emotional pathway for the writer herself to enter into
the world of the novel” as well as offering a “pathway to the readers into the
foreign world” (Polack 2014: 526). Elsewhere she calls these “bridges into
history for the reader” (Polack 2014: 529). I was using the material processes
described to inhabit Amy’s inner world and try to render it convincingly for
readers. Through them I hoped to build bridges between my self, the dead woman
and future readers, to create that “credible and compelling” version of Amy’s
life so desired at the project’s outset.
These processes are familiar to many
writers, attempts to establish what Suzanne Keen calls the “triangulated
empathetic bond”, where “authors’ empathy contributes to the creation of
textual beings designed to elicit empathetic responses from readers” (Keen
2006: 221-2). In this way fiction, through an act of “empathetic imagination”
(Pavel 2000: 536, original italics), attempts to answer those questions
unanswerable upon the death of the other. The concept of narrative empathy is
used frequently by fiction writers and literary scholars, so it is useful to
pause and explore its nuances in this context. The term “empathy” was coined at
the turn of the twentieth century, drawn from the German term Einfühlung (Hayward 2005:
1071). Mary-Catherine Harrison highlights the early sense of the word that
concerned how humans relate to an object: “empathy is a concept born of the
union between psychology and aesthetics” (2008: 256). Eva-Maria Engelen and
Birgitt Röttger-Rössler define it as “a social feeling
that consists in feelingly grasping or retracing the present, future, or past
emotional state of the other” (2012: 3-4). They also see it as “the embodied
(or bodily grounded) capacity to feel one’s way into others, to take part in
the other’s affective situation, and adopt the other’s perspective” (Engelen and Röttger-Rössler 2012: 5). For
Suzanne Keen: “empathy describes a projective fusing with an object—which may
be another person or an animal, but may also be a fictional character made of
words” (2006: 213). Through the processes described I was striving for such a
“projective fusing”, trying to put myself in Amy’s shoes, to see the world
through her eyes, so that readers might as well.
Writers’ accounts of their enthusiasm
for empathetic imagination are generally treated with suspicion. Keen
summarizes the criticisms: “I impose my feelings on you and call them your
feelings. Your feelings, whatever they were, undergo erasure” (2006: 222).
Samarasan (2007: 225) echoes the warning:
To put
yourself in another’s shoes is only the first step toward fulfilling Forster’s
exhortation to connect, and a dangerous step at that, for once you stand in
those shoes, the other person disappears for a moment. How easy it is to forget
to stop and wait and listen in that moment: inside your own head so much else
is going on, so much of it is louder than what you’re waiting for.
Colin Davis issues a similar caution
about attempts to write the dead: “[T]he danger, of course, is that what the
dead say may only be the projections of what we want to hear” (2004: 78). Inga
Clendinnen fears that fiction writers might be “misled by their confidence in
their novelist’s gift of empathetic imagination”, suggesting that we might
“sometimes project back into that carefully constructed material setting
contemporary assumptions and current obsessions” (2006: 27-28). Importantly, it
is not just novelists who need to be cautious here. Historian Keith Jenkins
applies the same wariness to his own discipline, suggesting the impossibility
of anyone gaining true insight and access to minds from the past (2003: 47-57).
Common to these warnings is a concern about the act of projection: that through
it, the intruding writerly self overwrites the actual experience of the dead,
negating any possibility of hearing the other’s voice or truly understanding
his or her feelings.
Returning to Keen’s definition,
however, it is clear that all empathy, in life or in fiction, is indeed
“projective” (2006: 213), rather than a transmission or true understanding of
what another feels. Actual empathy, by definition, is impossible. Whether we
are trying to imagine the inner lives of the long dead or a stranger beside us
on a train, all we can hope for is an approximation, filtered through the self.
Despite this impossibility, Keen notes the studies of “empathy accuracy”
demonstrating that, within the boundaries of our own cultures, our empathetic
projections are often remarkably close (2006: 222). The question she asks is
the same one reverberating through the earlier-described anxieties about
writers projecting themselves into the space of their subjects: “can narrative
empathy call to us across boundaries of difference?” (Keen 2006: 223). Can we
accurately imagine what it feels like to be someone born into a world alien to
our own, or do we simply overwrite this otherness with a disguised
representation of the self? The study results cited by Keen suggest our
projections are not so accurate for those far removed from the self (2006:
213-14). How then might we come to empathize more accurately with those beyond
our immediate and familiar groups? Some say this is where work is most needed.
For Samarasan, we “don’t need fiction to learn to empathize with those who
resemble us; the real challenge is to see ourselves—to find those sometimes
comforting, sometimes terrifying shared kernels of humanity—in those who are
nothing like us on the surface” (2007: 217). Others feel that while the desire
for empathetic connection might be impossible, the quest for it may be valuable
in itself. Geraldine Brooks (2006: 11) writes powerfully about her sense of the
importance of empathy work:
The effort to
empathize and imagine and put ourselves in other shoes is always worthwhile,
whether it is engaged when watching the evening news or when reading about
someone dead for more than a hundred years.
A recent study showed that fiction
writers were “likely to be among these high empathy individuals” (Keen 2006:
207), especially in the categories of the “tendency to fantasize, to feel
empathic concern for others, to experience personal distress in the face of
others’ suffering, and to engage in perspective-taking” (Keen 2006: 221).
Another result was the speculation that “the activity of fiction writing may
cultivate novelists’ role-taking skills and make them more habitually
empathetic” (Keen 2006: 221, original italics). This speculation suggests
that doing the work of fiction (which resonates with Brooks’ “effort”) means
fiction writers frequently exercise “the mind’s muscles” of empathy (OED 2016)
in our practices of fantasy and perspective-taking, much as the body’s muscles
are exercised by a brisk walk or yoga. The act of narrative projection is
significant, then, even if it is not an accurate representation of the other.
It is important whether the projective voice makes us believe we are someone
else for a moment or if it does not convince, forcing us to consider the
failures of empathy, or the challenges of forging empathetic links with those
different to ourselves. It matters because of the work it makes each of us do,
the emotional and cognitive experience of trying to imagine ourselves in
another’s shoes. In this way we might consider the inner life of a stranger
and, for the first time, recognize something there.
The creative processes undertaken
while working to bring Amy Dudley to life on the page were also attempts at
establishing another closely related (and equally scrutinized) narrative
quality: authenticity. According to Bryony Stocker, this is a key criterion by
which the success of a work in this genre is judged: “Authenticity has been
central to debates around historical fiction since the genre’s inception”
(2012: 308). It is demanded by “literary critics, reviewers and readers of the
genre” (Stocker 2012: 311). Authenticity has many components, but one of the
most relevant to this discussion is language, often manifested through
narrative voice. A voice that is perceived to be authentic is one way to
establish a reader’s belief in the character and events portrayed. If readers
do not believe in these, then it is unlikely they will make the empathetic leap
described above. When developing her voices from the past, Geraldine Brooks
strives for “a sense of authenticity in language”, which she sees as “an essential
ingredient in creating a convincing fictional world” (Brooks 2006: 9). Brooks
makes a distinction between “true authenticity” in language and this “sense of
authenticity” (2006: 9). She suggests that “true authenticity would have been a
burdensome distraction to the reader, who could not be expected to toil through
pages of archaic Derbyshire dialect” (2006: 9). Stocker describes such an
approach as “immersive”, “where vocabulary, sentence structure and spelling are
all faithfully reproduced” (Stocker 2012: 311). For Stocker this approach is
“only possible for periods within living memory” (2012: 312) and so is not
suited to the “majority of historical fiction” (2012: 312), which is set at a
greater distance.
Instead, many writers use techniques
to create a hybrid voice, what novelist David Mitchell describes as “‘Bygonese’
– which is inaccurate but plausible” (cited in Stocker 2012: 313). This kind of
voice is not wholly authentic, but its aim is “effect rather than accuracy”
(ibid.). The authenticity “effect” is, of course, felt and judged
by readers. If the voice is deemed inauthentic it can disrupt their engagements
with character and story. As an example of this, Jerome de Groot cites
criticisms of novelist Suzannah Dunn for using language in dialogue that
readers felt was too modern (de Groot 2009: 221; also cited in Stocker 2012:
310). The assurance and vehemence of such criticisms is intriguing, given that
we don’t have any real idea of how people actually spoke in the long-distant past.
For Stocker (2012: 310):
In the place
of recorded speech, historians have used documents such as letters, and this
more formal deployment of language has been accepted as indicative of everyday
speech, inevitably giving a misleading impression.
These documents might hint at accents
and speech rhythms, as Amy’s letters did for me, but they show nothing of how
formal or informal spoken language was, whether people used contractions, or
how they addressed each other. Gillian Polack notes a tendency in recent
portrayals of the Middle Ages which can be applied more generally to fictional
writing about the past: “The popular understanding of the Middle Ages rests far
more on modern Medievalism than on modern historical narratives. […] In effect,
matching preconceptions of the Middle Ages is more important than exploring the
historical past for most fiction writers” (Polack 2014: 535). What we have,
then, is an aspect of the past that cannot be retrieved (how people spoke), in
tension with surviving archival material that has set up a series of prevailing
and often steadfastly lodged assumptions about that past. These are used by
readers to judge the authenticity of a work.
There is more at stake here than
whether a character, her voice and her world seem authentic to the chosen
period. Quibbling in these ways about the authenticity of language in
historical fictions demonstrates a broader anxiety in this genre: the closeness
(actual or perceived) of fictional representations to the past. If writers are
thought to be taking liberties with voice, what else might they be playing fast
and loose with? How do real and fictive, history and fiction, sit together?
Often uneasily, it seems—as awkward as the term “historical fiction”, already
itself a cumbersome hybrid. Concerns about this issue have long been present.
After the publication of Kenilworth, Walter Scott’s famous version of
Amy Dudley’s tale which strays far from the historical record, Alfred Bartlett
wrote that:
As long as
the tale is regarded as purely fictitious, it would be literary prudery to make
objections to it. But when there is danger of its being regarded as grounded on
facts, the student of truth will desire to see due discrimination made between
fiction grounded on the superstitious traditions of the ignorant peasantry, and
the incontrovertible records of history (Bartlett 1850: 130).
The same anxiety still pulses, almost
two hundred years later. Historian Michael Cathcart, interviewing Elizabeth
Gilbert for the 2015 Perth Writers’ Festival, states that he is often
disoriented when reading historical fiction because he isn’t sure what the
“truth claims” are (Cathcart 2015). His disorientation powerfully captures an
embodied reaction to the blurred lines in these genres. Like Bartlett’s
“student of truth” (1850: 130), Cathcart is concerned about how readers
differentiate between what is true and what is fabricated. How can we draw the
line between the actual past and our representation of it? This is especially
felt when the work is based on “real” people, what has lately been called
“biofiction”: “literature that names its protagonist after an actual
biographical figure” (Lackey 2016: 3). Theorizing this genre, Michael Lackey
(2016: 8-9) asks a number of questions for future investigation. One of these
is: “What truth contract do authors of biofiction tacitly make with their
readers?” (Lackey 2016: 9). Despite recent historiographical work questioning
assumptions about “the incontrovertible records of history” (Bartlett 1850:
130), some readers of historical fiction are made decidedly uneasy by its
slippage between “fact” and fiction.
It makes writers anxious too.
According to de Groot: “as a genre the historical novel provokes a certain
anxiety and disquiet on the part of the writer” (2010: 9). A symptom of this
anxiety is the paratext—rarely are readers of this genre given the novel’s
text unaccompanied by explanatory material such as author notes, timelines,
character lists and sources (de Groot 2010: 67). Authors create this complex
apparatus to help readers understand how they have approached the “real” in
their stories. Many will document their sources or note where they have strayed
from the historical record. Stocker suggests the purpose of these paratexts is
“as much to aid verisimilitude as fill in gaps of understanding” (2012: 315).
They do this by establishing or clarifying the work’s “truth claims” alongside
the fiction, perhaps in part as preemptive strikes against readerly criticisms.
Despite the strivings of such
apparatus, the distinction between real and imagined in the historical or
biographical novel is not clear nor easily resolved. We might learn that one
character has been blended with another or multiple events collapsed into one,
but it does not settle the question of the relationship between fact and
invention. The immersive experience of realist historical fiction exists in
parallel with readers’ awareness that this is a constructed world which perhaps
goes against the historical record. We might consider this a quality of all
fiction, but it seems amplified in historical fiction. Readers must either
oscillate between belief and doubt in the construction or somehow let both
exist at the same time. The peculiar doubleness of the genre is compelling for
Jerome de Groot, featuring heavily in his most recent work (2015). For him, “The
‘double effect’ is an uncanny, almost uncomfortable, moment, as the ‘real’ and
the ‘wrought’ stand together in the same room” (de Groot 2015: 24). This is the “authentic fallacy”
of the genre (de Groot 2010: 183) or “the paradox of authenticity” (182): that “the historical novel must look like it is the original” (de
Groot 2015: 16), but of course it cannot be. He calls this “[t]he central
paradox of historical fiction, the consciously false realist representation of
something that can never be known” (de Groot 2010: 113). Richard Holmes writes
of a similar paradox of biography: “Somehow you had to produce the living
effect, while remaining true to the dead fact” (2005: 27). The challenge of
this was made painfully real for Holmes when following in the footsteps of
Stevenson. As described earlier, he almost expected his subject to appear in
person (2005: 26). Waiting on the bridge into a small town through which
Stevenson had travelled, Holmes felt that at any minute his subject would
arrive. A devastating epiphany then came: the bridge he stood on was modern.
The old one that Stevenson would have crossed was further up-river, broken and
crumbling: “You could not cross such bridges any more, just as one could not
cross literally into the past” (Holmes 2005: 27; also discussed by Carroll
2015). He realized then that we can never inhabit or truly represent the past.
In these accounts, true authenticity is like true empathy—impossible. To achieve the impossible double effect of perceived
authenticity, writers develop something qualified,
a compromise, which can be related to Brooks’ “sense of authenticity” in
language (2006: 9). For Stocker (2012: 310):
Authenticity
is a negotiation between the evidence available to the writer, the reader’s
existing understanding of the period and the imaginative power of the author,
which combined, can only present the spirit of an era, rather than its
actuality.
Authenticity is thus an effect of the
text on a reader’s perceptions, rather than an unqualified attribute of the
text itself. It is a “spectral projection on to the past” (de Groot 2015: 21)
conjuring a “spirit of an era” (Stocker 2012: 310), which intrudes into the
space of a lost past neither writers nor readers can ever reach.
What then of my quest to create a
“credible and compelling sense” of Amy Dudley’s life and voice? Is my
manuscript a case of what Martha Tuck Rozett calls “the modern people in fancy
dress one often finds in even the best of much popular historical fiction”
(1995: 163)? Of
course it is. I’m a fiction writer. I’m as fraudulent as a nineteenth-century
spiritualist, standing draped in muslin and gelatine once the gaslights are
relit. A pinch of early modern spice doesn’t change the fact that the pottage
is cooking four and a half centuries later. The body that walked through Amy’s
landscape and wrote about it is one born in the twentieth century. All my
tactile and cognitive sensibilities are inscribed with and by this world which will,
of course, affect my attempts to empathize with and create an authentic sense
of a body born centuries earlier, despite sitting in the same church and
walking the same hills, despite reading letters and journals of the time.
According to Michael Lackey, “What we get in a biographical novel,
then, is the novelist’s vision of life and the world, and not an accurate
representation of an actual person’s life” (Lackey 2016: 7). As novelist Lion Feuchtwanger claimed
in 1935, “I
have come to the conclusion that the artist had no other intention than to give
expression to his own (contemporary) attitudes and a subjective (but in no
sense historical) view of the world” (2015: para. 4). Coming to this
realization, I understand that Amy’s voice is silenced, that her body is gone,
and that my manuscript reveals more about my world than hers despite the work’s
early modern setting.
So if my aim is to hear Amy’s voice
but all I hear is my own, then the desire which drives the work is clearly
impossible. I will never hear her voice. For Holmes, such recognition comes painfully. It changes how he engages with the people and places of the past,
forcing him to re-work his understanding of his own motivations and processes.
This “moment of personal disillusion is the moment of impersonal, objective
re-creation” (Holmes 2005: 67). His experience at the wrong bridge brought on a new
stage in his development as a biographer, where he could understand the role of
his own interest in and identification with his subject: “the true biographic
process begins precisely at the moment, at the places, where this naïve form of
love and identification breaks down” (ibid.). Writers of historical
fiction stand at a similar crossroads: do we recognize the futility of the
original quest and stop, or do we go on? Hilary Mantel advises writers to
“[r]elax” and “accept that you will never be authentic” (2012: para. 4).
Somehow we continue, despite the impossibility (or perhaps to spite it). And so
do readers of such works. According to de Groot, “Readers enjoy historical
novels: that is why they sell” (2015: 21). These are “often read within a nexus
of entertainment, imaginative journeying, and pedagogy” (14). At
this nexus, different readerly motivations and interests intersect to influence
how each reader engages with the peculiar doubleness of the genre. For de
Groot, the “fundamental strangeness” of the genre is “one of the most important
attributes of the historical novel” (2010: 6). It catalyzes a sophisticated
movement within readers (and perhaps writers) of this genre, where two
contradictory or opposing views can be held—an awareness of the “trick” of
the genre and also a felt response, a sense of the story and characters coming
to life within a reader, despite the impossibility. For de Groot: “[I]t seems
to me that the historical novel, whilst happily hoodwinking its audience, does
so with their collusion” and that “this complicity is […] self-conscious and
self-aware” (ibid.). Readers somehow allow the contradiction to exist. Might
some of the pleasure of reading and writing historical fiction then come from
this complex and “inherently contradictory” relationship between the real and
the imagined (de Groot 2010: 31), by holding these opposites in delicious and
uncomfortable tension and allowing the real and the fictive to (impossibly)
exist together, rather than in opposition?
To allow themselves to be “happily”
hoodwinked (de Groot 2010: 6) in this way, readers and writers of historical
fiction must use a paradoxical logic that allows for “both/and” rather than
“either/or” responses. It is not the only aspect of reading that requires the
same logic, within the genre and beyond. Discussions of divisions between
“self” and “other” in empathy studies blur the binary in similar ways. Engelen
& Röttger-Rössler (2012: 5) describe the “self-other overlap”—a place
where the edges of the self and the other are not as separate as we might
assume. Pavel writes about the plasticity of the “I” when reading fiction, but
his ideas are equally apt for the writing of it: “At the individual level, the
predisposition towards fiction depends on the plasticity of the I” (2000: 527),
which makes the distinction between “our own I and their I” (536)
impossible to maintain. Novelist Gail Jones (2006: 17-18) describes a similar
concept, the “fictive memory” evoked by Georges Perec in his work on migration:
Of course,
the term sounds oxymoronic, perhaps slightly fraudulent, a fancy term merely
for the art of fiction. But Perec insisted there was a zone in which we enter
history as a floating ghost might, looking around, absorbing details,
affections and experiences, yet not wholly actualised. Neither subject nor
object, this is a position, one might say, of ethical transitivity. In
phenomenological terms both reading and writing operate in this way. We engage
in spooky projections, we read and write across thresholds of actuality, even
plausibility; we detach and attach with spirited mobility, gratuitous and
energetic.
The “ethical transitivity” Jones
describes opens a space between subject and object, a porous “I” that coalesces
somewhere between historical figure, author and reader. This resonates with
Keen’s “triangulated empathetic bond” (2006: 221-2) described earlier. Writers attempt
impossible empathetic imagination to represent the inner lives of their
characters, and readers use a similar ability to feel for the people portrayed.
It is always a projection, an intrusion, and yet, paradoxically, it opens a
space where we are encouraged to inhabit the lives of those different from
ourselves. For Paul de Man, such a speculative space “posits the possibility of
the latter’s reply” (1979: 926). In the silence after death, it reminds us that
long-dead person once had a voice. It encourages us to imagine that voice or
that self, even if we know it is our own self that blunders in, even if we know
these are just projections. Projective: the might have been. This ethical
transitivity or self-other overlap reminds me that my “self” and the “other”
are never discrete entities, static and closed and hermetically sealed. Rather
the “I” of the self contains fictive fragments, projections of those others who
live around us: in life, in memory, in fiction. Attempts to write the dead
function like this too. I’ll never truly know how Amy felt and I’ll never hear
her voice, but in trying to imagine, I’m opening a space for the consideration
of a woman’s experiences lived on the margins of history, within myself and
hopefully within readers. A woman who can no longer tell her own story.
Afterword
In my son’s early life, when he was
revelling in the echolalia that comes before proper speech, I found myself
listening for words and sense. Of course I wanted to hear “mama” and “dada”,
but every word was a revelation. A magic trick, pulling language from the air.
The way he pronounced some words surprised me. Moosic, he would say. Bootiful.
Again came that peculiar and chiming familiarity. That’s just how my nana would
have said it. I’m Portsmouth-born and my words are south-coast meets BBC meets
thirty-plus years in Australia, so his pronunciation was a shock. Impossible
that my son might speak with the vowels of my dead grandmother, but there it
was. And of course Amy was there too, linked irrevocably with my nana’s voice
after reading her letters. Three voices in one, the dead speaking through the
living. In a different context, Stephen Greenblatt (1988: 1) emphasizes the
role of language in preserving the voice of the other:
It was true
that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the
dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and
those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living.
Early in my research I discovered that
Amy had been born only a few miles from where my nana grew up. Despite the
years between them, might they be connected by Greenblatt’s “textual traces”?
How clearly I can imagine Amy walking the boundaries of the estate with her
father. One of my agricultural-labourer ancestors stills his hands to greet the
squire and his daughter. Words are exchanged—an enquiry about my ancestor’s
children, an observation about the sheep. Amy’s words enter him, to be passed
down through my family from mouth to mouth: shared, disputed, repeated,
inherited. This web of Norfolk-speaking stretches across centuries and
continents, somehow connecting Amy’s letters and my nana’s voice and my son’s
early words. I think then about my manuscript. Without a doubt it is written in
my voice and represents my world. But within my voice is my nana’s, nested like
epigenetic memory (Powering the Mind, Catalyst 2015). Nested even
deeper might be the voice of Amy Dudley. Perhaps, impossibly, she is closer
than I thought.
Notes
[1]
See Padmore (2009) for an exploration
of this issue.
[2]
Dudley, A. (n.d.), Letter to Mr
Flowerdew, Harl. MS 4712, British Library, London; Dudley, A. 1560, Letter to Mr Edney, Dudley
Papers, DU/VOL. IV, Longleat House, Wiltshire. I have written elsewhere about
other aspects of these letters. See Padmore (2010).
Acknowledgements
An early draft of this paper was
presented at the 2015 conference of the Australasian Association of Writing
Programs (Swinburne University, 28 November to 1 December). I am grateful to
colleagues there for commentary and suggestions, as well as to the members of
the Creative Arts and English academic writing group at La Trobe University,
and to this journal’s anonymous reviewers.
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Dr Catherine Padmore has taught literary studies and creative writing at La Trobe University since 2005. Her first novel, Sibyl’s Cave (Allen and Unwin, 2004) was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Award and commended in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (first-book category). Catherine has been awarded two retreat fellowships at Varuna, the Writers’ House, for novels-in-progress about the Tudor women Amy Dudley and Levina Teerlinc. Her short creative works have been published in Island, The Journal of Australian Writers and Writing, The Big Issue, The Australian, Dotlit and Antithesis, and in the anthologies Reflecting on Melbourne (Poetica Christi, 2009) and Grieve (Newcastle Writers’ Centre, 2015). Catherine’s scholarly work has been published in Australian Literary Studies, TEXT, JASAL, Life Writing and Lateral, with chapters in Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935-2012 (MUP, 2013) and Expanding the Canon of Early Modern Women’s Writing (CSP, 2010).