The Historical Novel

This isn't particularly relevant to what we are reading in the Antiquity: Gods and Mortals colloquium, but I thought it was an interesting and important point that would have been helpful when we were discussing The Sun Also Rises and "The Wasteland" last semester.

I just read an article for another COL seminar with a section titled "Novel and Biography." While the article discusses the 19th century, and not the 20th century explicitly, it charts the emergence of the biographical and autobiographical novel. The passage comes from a book Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867 - 1887 by Stephen Gilman. I will relate the most interesting passages here.

He begins this section with the question "Why was the nineteenth century so anxious to cater at first to historical novelists and later to novelist historians?"

The remarkable interaction of history and fiction, which was achieved in France by Balzac and Zola and in Spain by Galdós and Leopoldo Alas, was not made possible because Goethe showed the way but because something had happened to history that transformed it from the record of growth of a nation or the ascent of mankind as a whole toward the light for which it was esteemed, when it was esteemed, in the eighteenth century) into a form of personal experience. Looked at in this way but not yet in terms of the individual lives that experienced it), the answer is quite simple: history had suddenly changed its tempo. It had suddenly accelerated, and, as a result, a Balzac or Galdós, along with his characters and readers, was able to identify with the crises of the 1820s, the 1840s, or the 1860s, because in their century historical time seemed to be moving forward at roughly the same pace as biological time.
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It is probably more enlightening to conceive of the mutation of sensibility generationally than collectively. Using the concept of the generation in the way those developing minds were beginning to use it themselves, i.e. as a shared awareness emerging from a common experience of major historical events, and ... seeking to communicate among themselves and eventually discovering together who and when they were.
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There was the intuition of a new kind of time: historical time. Musset is even more expressive on this dimension: "Three elements segmented the life which offered itself to these young people: behind them a past forever destroyed; before them the dawn of an immense horizon, the first glimmerings of the future; and between these two worlds" a wasteland where past and future are intertwined and where "at every step one does not know whether he is treading on a seed or on a shard." (Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century, p. 14)

I thought this might be a good thing to share because I remember more than a few people telling me that they didn't enjoy The Sun Also Rises and didn't understand why we spent so much time discussing it. I think it is a great example of what Gilman explains as a shift in the perception of history and how it could be recorded and transmitted in the personal histories of individuals as artifacts of and metaphors for the epoch at large.

I remember at the beginning of our current colloquium, we banished the word "novel," because it fails to describe any work we might discuss this semester. I suppose the birth of the novel happened not too long ago (especially when we remember that the written story of Gilgamesh is around 4000 years old), and the new novel as a fictional biography or autobiography, is an even more recent and interesting development.