AHR Forum: Histories and Historical Fictions
"Na Longer an Evenly Flowing River":
Time, History, and the Novel
LYNN HUNT
IN A FEW, DECEPTIVELY SMOOTH PAGES OF PROSE, Margaret Atwood raises a swarm of
questions about fiction, history, time, memory, and writing.' They buzz around each
other, massing for a moment here or there around a particularly juicy morsel but
rarely take a precisely defined shape. Her evidence likewise darts off in many
directions and, because it comes from Canadian novels, will be unfamiliar to some
readers. So why should historians linger here? Should we not just admire, or envy,
her light touch and gentle prodding and then turn our heels and avoid this hornet's
nest?
A recent experience in the classroom compelled me to draw closer than I might
otherwise have thought wise. When I last taught my department's large introductory
course on European history, "Europe in a Wider World, 1550-Present," to some
250 students, I assigned in addition to the textbook and collection of documents the
usual variety of historical and fictional works: Shakespeare's Macbeth, Carlo
Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals,
Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. On
the final examination, much to my chagrin, many, if not most, students referred to
all these works, including Browning's, as "novels," even though I thought I had
assigned no novels at all. Since then, I have recurrently worried about the meaning
of this confusion. Has the distinction between history and fiction (leaving aside the
division between plays and novels) somehow vanished among the young? Does the
erasure reveal something fundamental about our supposedly postmodern age?
Should I begin my lectures by explaining the difference between history writing and
fiction?
No doubt I should explain the difference between history and fiction to my
undergraduate students. Atwood's essay, however, prompts me to consider whether
this is really the vital issue for those who write history. She takes more or less for
granted the difference between history and fiction, and so, I will argue, should
historians. The boundaries separating the two are worth exploring but only briefly.
Of much greater interest are the underlying reasons for the increasing convergence
between certain kinds of history and certain kinds of fiction. This convergence
might go some way toward explaining the reaction of my students. Even though
1 Margaret Atwood, "In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction," rpt. in
AHR 103 (December 1998): 1503-16.
1517
Lynn Hunt
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Atwood does not herself frame the issue in terms of convergence, she does lead us
to it by shifting her focus back and forth. When she asks, for example, why the
Canadian historical novel has become so popular, she answers with a history-of
Canadian history and Canadian novels and of her own very successful endeavors to
combine the two. In the process of recounting these histories, she poses important
questions about the appeal of the past and the meaning of time itself. "No longer
an evenly flowing river," in much of twentieth-century painting and novels, she
maintains, "time became a collage of freeze-frames, jumbled fragments, and
jump-cuts."? Although she does not necessarily endorse this view of time, she forces
historians to think about their own.
Time runs through her essay like a haunting motif, but Atwood does not use it to
distinguish history from fiction. Everything she says about the novel in this
regard-"The novel concerns itself, above all, with time ... there must be change
in a novel" -might also, and uncontroversially, be said about history.' There are
clocks in history, too. When Atwood strikes her different notes on the meaning of
time, she is unperturbed by any worries about the boundaries between history and
fiction. She assumes that history and fiction are different in some respects and alike
in others; maintaining a clear separation between the two is not only unnecessary
for her purposes but possibly distracting. She worked hard, she recounts, to give her
own historical novel numerous true details of daily life in mid-nineteenth-century
Canada and still never thought she was writing something other than fiction.
Although nothing can more predictably elevate the temperature of discussion
among professional historians than the theoretical question of the degree of
similarity of history to fiction, I want to follow Atwood in avoiding it. For her, the
dilemmas facing history and fiction are much alike, though perhaps confronted
differently: "How do we know we know what we think we know?" And, speaking of
the knower, "If the'!' of now has nothing to do with the T of then, where did the
'I' of now come from?"4 Rather than proceed from these questions to long
disquisitions on the objectivity of knowledge or the philosophical meaning of
identity, Atwood immediately changes gears. The question of knowledge leads her
to the problem of individual identity over time, which in turn leads her to the novel
because it is centrally concerned with memory and identity. Consideration of
identity leads her in particular to the Canadian historical novel because it seems to
offer a response to the denial of memory and with it the continuities of identity. By
shifting gears in this fashion, she bypasses all the potholes of theoretical dispute and
all the dead ends of inconclusive epistemological argument. Instead, she tells a
story.
This account of the "digging up of buried things"5 might have aroused only a kind
of provincial interest-how an ex-colony such as Canada challenged the cultural
dominance of London, Paris, and New York-if it had not been intertwined with
more general concerns about the experience of time and history at the end of the
twentieth century. Has the popularity of the historical novel grown because the past
2
3
4
5
Atwood,
Atwood,
Atwood,
Atwood,
"In
"In
"In
"In
Search
Search
Search
Search
of Alias
of Alias
of Alias
of Alias
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Grace,"
Grace,"
Grace,"
Grace,"
1507.
1506.
1505, 1507.
1509.
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seems safer than the present? Is this passion for history just an exercise in nostalgia,
regret, or guilt? Or is it merely a version of anthropological curiosity, what Atwood
calls "the lure of time travel"?" Is discovery of the past only an empty kind of
emotional reassurance?
Having raised these various possibilities, Atwood then offers her own provocative
but undeveloped suggestion to explain the appeal of history: "it has to do with the
age we are now," as a culture and not as individuals. By this, she seems to imply that
Canadian and even Western culture is now middle-aged and therefore finds itself
almost inevitably "taking a long hard look backwards" to place itself." Although she
limits her pursuit of this insight to the telling of the story of her own experience of
writing a historical novel, it has a wider resonance.
I do not mean, however, that Atwood subscribes to an explicit postmodernist
stance that claims the culture has exhausted the potential of modernism and with
it scientific standards of truth, the conviction that history can capture an objective
reality, the belief that individual identity displays continuity over time, and so on.
Just as she sidesteps the disputes about history and fiction, continually juggling their
differences and similarities, she also adopts a disabused stance toward historical
documentation without giving up on the search for historical verisimilitude. She
discovers that the documents tell no one true story; that documents themselves are
produced by a process of sorting, sifting, shaping, and suppression; that what is
written on paper cannot be automatically trusted. And yet, she proceeds to study
those documents, compare them for inconsistencies, and develop an account that as
fairly as possible represents "all points of view" of her characters. She forthrightly
recognizes that all of us face certain insoluble dilemmas; she shares the pervasive
"uneasiness about the trustworthiness of memory, the reliability of story, and the
continuity of time."8 It is the last of these that interests me here, because historians
have largely ignored it.
In the recent disputes about historical epistemology and the rapidly growing body
of work on historical memory, too little attention has been paid to the question of
time itself. As Atwood's essay shows, the issue will not disappear even if we are not
sure-as she is not-what to make of it. Certain aspects of the modern conception
of historical time have come under fire: the teleology of progress and modernization and any notion of linear development have been explicitly challenged from
many quarters." Even though few historians would refer, as some anthropologists
do, to "the oppressive uses of Time," many historians who study the non-West do
question the idea that all cultures live in the empty simultaneity of a kind of
Newtonian historical time.l'' We no longer assume, in short, that time is "an evenly
flowing river."
It has proved much easier, however, to dispute the modernist conception of
historical time than to develop an adequate replacement for it. Atwood's essay can
Atwood, "In Search of Alias Grace," 1511.
Atwood, "In Search of Alias Grace," 1511, 1512.
8 Atwood, "In Search of Alias Grace," 1515.
9 Although I do not think that history is currently in a state of crisis, I do agree with Joan Scott that
"the very meaning of time ... is what is at stake." Joan W. Scott, "Border Patrol," French Historical
Studies 21 (Summer 1998): 383-97, quote 392.
10 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), 2.
6
7
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Lynn Hunt
be read as a meditation on precisely this issue, for she is obviously uncomfortable
with the implications of time conceived only in terms of "freeze-frames, jumbled
fragments, and jump-cuts." She turns to the historical novel as a way of exploring
the meanings of temporality. Historians have been recently prospecting the same
kind of terrain, even when this has not been their conscious intention. The most
striking recent trends in historical writing-microhistory, the persistent popularity
of biography, and the displacement of historical interest into museum exhibitions,
historical novels, films, CD-ROMs, and interactive web sites-all thrive on a certain
suspension of belief about temporal continuity. They all dig more deeply into one
moment, and it is not clear what conception of time might unify them or even if they
require an elaborated temporality. Yet since most of these forms participate in the
revival of narrative (without in any way implying a necessary teleology or
meta-narrative), they depend on novelistic techniques of presentation. History and
fiction thus converge on questions of narrative and time. It is hardly accidental,
then, that Atwood returns again and again to these issues.
The current convergence between certain kinds of history and certain kinds of
fiction may well represent a return of the long repressed mutual implication of the
two. The modern novel and modern history writing both drew from the same well
of temporal realism dug in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Literary
theorists and historians alike have begun to explore the origins of modern
temporality. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the novel depends on a modern "chronotope" (time-space matrix) that foregrounds everyday life. In his view, the novel
gets its distinctiveness and vitality from this relationship to time.t' Benedict
Anderson reversed the terms and maintained that the novel and the newspaper
themselves propagated a new notion of temporality; they configured the "secular,
historically clocked, imagined community" of modern life. "One could argue,"
Anderson suggested, "that every essential modern conception is based on a
conception of 'meanwhile.' "12
There is little agreement about the precise origins of modern temporality,
although most scholars trace them to the "early modern period." Some find the
sources of what Walter Benjamin called "homogeneous, empty time" in the age of
discoveries made by the new science and European overseas voyages.> In the most
ambitious historical study of modern time consciousness, Reinhart Koselleck
recounts a whole series of political and cultural ruptures that transformed the
notion of time between 1500 and 1800,14 More recently, literary historian Stuart
Sherman has traced to mid-seventeenth-century England the "culturally critical
encounter" between chronometry and a new prose structure (the diary and its
descendant, the newspaper): "In England during the 1660s, a new technology for
counting time on clocks emerged simultaneously with a new paradigm for recount11 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist, ed., Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, trans. (Austin, Tex., 1981).
12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
rev. edn. (London, 1991),35,24.
13 On Benjamin, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24. On the importance of the age of
discoveries, see Fabian, Time and the Other, 3.
14 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Keith Tribe, trans.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
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ing it in prose." Sherman brilliantly analyzes how "closely calibrated clocks and
calendrically successive texts" shaped our modern consciousness of time and, not
incidentally, all forms of social practice, including especially the temporal realism
of the novel.P
Although much remains to be uncovered about "the planes of historicity," the
topic of time is clearly on the agenda.!" At the end of the twentieth century,
novelists and historians are beginning to develop a temporal conscience; they have
begun to question the most fundamental-and the most theoretically implicitdimension of their endeavor. Its very appearance as a contestable subject is
significant in itself. As in so many things, consciousness of hidden choices only
becomes possible when different options seem to appear on the horizon. The
modern sense of time came into being as a sense of break with the past, and the new
interest in the givenness of temporality might be evidence that our notions and
experience of time are changing once again. But just what these new conceptions
might be remains to be seen. For my purposes, then, I would slightly alter Atwood's
concluding line, "The past [Time] belongs to us, because we are the ones who need
it." Time consciousness, like Atwood's past, has to be infused with "meaning for
those alive today."!"
15
Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (Chicago,
1996), x-xi,
16
17
Koselleck, Futures Past, 3.
Atwood, "In Search of Alias Grace," 1516.
Lynn Hunt is Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of various books on the French Revolution, co-author
with Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob of Telling the Truth about History
(1994), editor of The New Cultural History (1989), and, with Jacques Revel,
Histories: French Constructions of the Past (1995). With Victoria Bonnell, Hunt
is editing a new collection, Beyond the Cultural Turn (forthcoming, 1999). She
is part of an interuniversity group preparing a web site and CD-ROM on the
French Revolution, found on the World Wide Web at www.chnm.gmu.edu/
revolution/.
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