#49,
novel histories
(1)
Introduction
I frequently assign novels in my courses. I do so for a number of reasons, the main one of which is that they generally force students to question the nature of history itself, and help break down assumptions that many students arrive at college with that history is a set of facts that they need to learn from a particular professor.
As I have tried to demonstrate throughout Histrionyx, engaging with novels is vital for questioning historical approaches and historiographical traditions, particularly in the case of studies of immigration (the focus of that e-book). It is all too easy for individual narratives to be written out of existence when historians try to make arguments about immigrant experiences. This absence then becomes particularly significant when we start to think in terms of gender issues in history. If the “personal is political,” as the mantra would have it, then we are losing a great deal when the individual experience is omitted from the historical text because it seems unrepresentative and doesn’t fit easily. So, perhaps only one person had a particular experience described in a novel; or perhaps the story never actually happened but was made believable by the novelist; how do we as historians use such narratives (bearing in mind that such use will be a theft in its own right – see Narrative is Theft)? At what point is this one experience so important that it weighs against the normative experience of the uprooted or the transplanted immigrant (to take immigration historiography as our template)? Taking one example, how do we deal with suicide in history – the act of the individual that fundamentally defies the normative? There are laws in place that make such things illegal (whatever that might mean for those who succeed), but do we historians also write our laws against such acts as well? What does the act of suicide tell us about history, beyond the assumption of individual psychosis that we may deploy to halt our inquiry?
That is just one
example, perhaps the most extreme. Novels,
it seems to me, constantly defy such laws imposed by The Historian, and so
they need to be embraced if we are to get anywhere near our goal of un-history
(gosh, is that our goal – that just slipped out?). Examples of novels that I have used in the classroom
are: Toni Morison’s Beloved (slavery);
P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith Journalist,
Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier
and Sister Carrie (Gilded Age);
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Anzia
Yezierska’s Bread Givers, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Thomas Bell’s
Out of this Furnace (immigration); Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Henry
James’s Bostonians, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (American Studies); James
Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (African American history);
Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood,
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,
and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(international history). These and
others that I have written about in the past will be focused on in this section.
Of course, everything in novel histories will lead towards Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a work that perhaps encompasses everthing that might be included herein; I hope we will be able to get there in the end.