The Opportunities of History

It's an off phrase. What opportunity does history afford writers, other than the specifics of the time and place in which they live? Several of the previous posts on this blog have been influenced by my reading of "Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick. Much of this book is concerned with the responsibility of both writer and reader: the writer's responsibility: being intellectually and morally faithful to history, even if not factually faithful; the reader's: not to distort an author's work in interpretation, so that the original manuscript loses its force. The dangers of misinterpretation are fully fleshed out in "Who Owns Anne Frank" - a daring and interesting article, as provocative as it is readable.

Then we have Hans Fallada. Fallada's concerns as a writer were mostly personal - it seems marriage, personal struggle and the hustle were his preoccupations. The trap Fallada falls into is that his hustle comes before his writing, instead of the other way around. Benjamin Lytal writes in the Nation:

"But the story about the kid living in the rubble sounds so much better suited to Fallada's interests and talents--not resistance but a little hustling, a struggle to put together a life. It's a pity he had to hustle so much to live his own."

Then James Wood brings up the old argument in the New Yorker that opposition makes for the best literature:

"Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What if writing were made a bit more exigent for us? What if we had less of everything? It might make our literary culture more “serious,” certainly more creatively ingenious. Instead of drowning in choice, we would have to be inventive around our thirst. Tyranny is the mother of metaphor, and all that."

It's just a device Wood uses to launch an article about Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel "Censoring an Iranian Love Story," but it's a familiar enough argument that it might deserve our attention.

And Cary Tennis in Salon remarks on the irony of living in some of the most interesting times in history, and having nothing to say about it:

"And then, with the irony that cloaks us against utter nihilism, we think, if only we were living in more interesting times! And that is the confounding thing about it, isn't it? That we stand on the nodal point of a great, creaking, crunching change in historical direction, at the beginning of cataclysmic planetary collapse, at the dying of civilization, at the rising of new empires, at our own meltdown, as a million stories bloom out of the earth like wildflowers in the spring and we think, gee, uh, if only there were some good stories to tell. "

The novel itself is a history in its way. A novel is about a self-contained world, which has to operate according to its own logic - and because of this, it is by its nature a historical, political narrative, even if the writer is trying to write apolitically or ahistorically. After all, to echo Orwell, these themselves are political and historical choices.

This is a problem black writers, Jewish writers, writers of many ethnic minorities face, when fearing being pigeonholed as a particular type of ethnic-champion writer. Writing a non-ethnic book is a political statement in itself. History affords writers opportunities, and it takes them away.