No, I hadn't seen it. It seems I wasn't missing much either. *gag*
The annoying thing about the article, as always, is that I find her insufferable, not least in her pretention to know history better than historians or revolution better than - or if not better than, exactly, at least as well as - revolutionaries. (The worst has to be when she claims at the end that "in a way, my people have written my book for me," because obviously, A Place of Greater Safety is exactly what Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins would have come up with if they had been allowed to put all their private thoughts on paper.) The worst is though, I can't disagree with her on everything; novels do have a kind of potential that histories don't have, not to get closer to the truth, but to show how something could have worked.
However, even there Mantel seems incapable of making a reasonable point: finding a plausible but unprovable scenario for something is not the same as finding out the truth about it. To take this post as an example, Piercy provides a plausible portrayal of Robespierre's relationship with Éléonore Duplay. More plausible, to my mind, than Mantel's. But not more true. Until such time as we can go back in time and plant secret cameras all around their house, we can't know the truth. (And even then, of course, we wouldn't be able to get inside their heads.) In the meantime, the best way to get at the truth remains looking at the evidence, making an argument, but acknowledging counterarguments even as one does this. Novelists can still only do one to two of these things at best. The most scrupulous novelist can only use fictionalized versions of the evidence and cannot include alternate scenarios unless s/he also includes alternate universes.
Mantel isn't entirely wrong about the potential of novels for exploring different possibilities, just about their supposedly superior ability to recognize truth. (Which in itself wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't for others' readiness to believe it. It's one thing for a novelist to say: I know more about history than historians. It's quite another for others in the media to say, "So you do! Come, be our resident expert on whatever historical area you have proclaimed yourself the expert on. Historians? Who needs them!" So yes, she's irritating, but unfortunately, she's not irritating in a vaccuum.)
A couple of specific points really jumped out at me as well:
You know, you would think that someone who so manifestly puts the personal over the political would know how old Robespierre, a "character" she spent twenty years writing about, was when he died. Here's a hint, HM, it wasn't 35.
It's funny that she claims to have wanted to write about the "dream" of Revolution in 1789 as something positive, when, the way I read it, her main characters were cynical and pessimistic from the start. Hell, their view of the world is shrouded from childhood in a gloom that only seems to deepen with the advent of the Revolution.
And once again, why is it that everyone seems to think that being a former Communist gives one some kind of privileged view of the French Revolution? It seems to have made up a good part of most revisionist historians' credentials.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: Saturday, 29 May 2010 01:48 (UTC)The annoying thing about the article, as always, is that I find her insufferable, not least in her pretention to know history better than historians or revolution better than - or if not better than, exactly, at least as well as - revolutionaries. (The worst has to be when she claims at the end that "in a way, my people have written my book for me," because obviously, A Place of Greater Safety is exactly what Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins would have come up with if they had been allowed to put all their private thoughts on paper.) The worst is though, I can't disagree with her on everything; novels do have a kind of potential that histories don't have, not to get closer to the truth, but to show how something could have worked.
However, even there Mantel seems incapable of making a reasonable point: finding a plausible but unprovable scenario for something is not the same as finding out the truth about it. To take this post as an example, Piercy provides a plausible portrayal of Robespierre's relationship with Éléonore Duplay. More plausible, to my mind, than Mantel's. But not more true. Until such time as we can go back in time and plant secret cameras all around their house, we can't know the truth. (And even then, of course, we wouldn't be able to get inside their heads.) In the meantime, the best way to get at the truth remains looking at the evidence, making an argument, but acknowledging counterarguments even as one does this. Novelists can still only do one to two of these things at best. The most scrupulous novelist can only use fictionalized versions of the evidence and cannot include alternate scenarios unless s/he also includes alternate universes.
Mantel isn't entirely wrong about the potential of novels for exploring different possibilities, just about their supposedly superior ability to recognize truth. (Which in itself wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't for others' readiness to believe it. It's one thing for a novelist to say: I know more about history than historians. It's quite another for others in the media to say, "So you do! Come, be our resident expert on whatever historical area you have proclaimed yourself the expert on. Historians? Who needs them!" So yes, she's irritating, but unfortunately, she's not irritating in a vaccuum.)
A couple of specific points really jumped out at me as well:
You know, you would think that someone who so manifestly puts the personal over the political would know how old Robespierre, a "character" she spent twenty years writing about, was when he died. Here's a hint, HM, it wasn't 35.
It's funny that she claims to have wanted to write about the "dream" of Revolution in 1789 as something positive, when, the way I read it, her main characters were cynical and pessimistic from the start. Hell, their view of the world is shrouded from childhood in a gloom that only seems to deepen with the advent of the Revolution.
And once again, why is it that everyone seems to think that being a former Communist gives one some kind of privileged view of the French Revolution? It seems to have made up a good part of most revisionist historians' credentials.