This week in “Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction,“ we are reading and discussing Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, featuring a seminar with the author and my University of Virginia students (for earlier posts on the MOOC see here, here, and here). Ms. Brooks visited us via satellite link-up from near her home on Martha’s Vineyard for an hour-long discussion of the novel, which reimagines the English village of Eyam during the great plague year of 1666-67. Our conversation ranged from the building of character to the process of research to the potential influence of the Book of Job on the novel’s depiction of the Eyam villagers and what they had to endure. Like the other seminars we’ve recorded for the on-line class, this one combined probing questions from the students with thoughtful and detailed responses from the author about the unique character of historical fiction as a genre and a craft.
At one point in the seminar our discussion came around to a broader question about the role of historical fiction in contemporary culture and society. I asked Geraldine Brooks if she would be willing to talk about her own vision of historical fiction as a genre, and how she sees this mode of writing as a bridge between past and present. Her wide-ranging response touched on a number of subjects: the correspondence between Sarah Orne Jewett and Henry James, her own experiences with pregnancy and childbirth, and the parallels between her past career as a foreign correspondent and her current profession as a writer of historical fiction. Those enrolled in the MOOC can listen to her response in full (the exchange begins around the eight-minute mark in the Part 3 video of the “Seminar with Geraldine Brooks”). But I also wanted to post a brief excerpt from this remarkable and truly moving moment in the seminar. Here is what she said about historical fiction:
There’s a fundamental rift [among] writers of historical fiction and it’s a rift that runs through other aspects of life too, which is, Same or different? Is what unites us more than what divides us? And as a foreign correspondent in the contemporary world, I would hear people all the time saying, ‘They’re not like us.’ One side saying about the other—white South Africans about black, Palestinians about Israelis—‘Their values are different, they don’t love their kids, they’re willing to sacrifice them, they don’t have the same material needs that we have,’ and it’s all BS in my view. You know, the sound of somebody keening for a dead child, is exactly the same, no matter if they’re in a…New York apartment, or an Eritrean refugee camp. There’s a fundamental belief that the human heart hasn’t changed that much. … At a time when you couldn’t expect to raise your kids, when death was ever present, there would’ve been a different approach to loss. But I don’t think it felt any different, I don’t think the emotion of loss felt any different, and I don’t think hatred felt any different, and I don’t think love did. And so, that for me is, where you start, with believing that human beings have these strong emotions in common. And that, that is more crucial to shaping consciousness than the furniture in the room. So, that’s my conviction about historical fiction, and it … drives everything for me.
It’s a powerful statement about the ethics of historical fiction in relation to human difference, the history of emotion, and contemporary political society. The seminar is definitely worth a full listen and viewing! You can find it on the course site under the “Video Lectures” tab to your left.
