The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century
E-mail: maria{at}thenation.com
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Abstract |
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What kind of responsibility does a novelist bear to the historical evidence? What gives him or her the authority to speak about the past? In the second half of the twentieth century historical novelists have worked between two strong, sometimes conflicting currents: modernism's recognition that all experience is subjective and every narrative partial, and the contention that the worst historical crimes are somehow unspeakable, so that only those who suffered them have the right to break the silence.
This paper offers close readings of two novels – Ian McEwan's Atonement (2002) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) – which both engage with the claims of storytelling as a means to assimilate and even atone for the past. While McEwan recreates in scrupulous detail the experience of British soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, his treatment of his novelist heroine, Briony, underlines the selfish motives behind any such retelling. For Morrison, writing from and for her own community, the writer's subjective shaping of her material is not a point of entry for self interest but a necessary way of changing our relation to the past, and so creating possibilities for the future.