Tag Archives: Francine Prose

Authentic language in historical fiction

Historical fiction, , , , ,

Any list of contenders for a major literary prize makes me pause to think about what makes some books exceptionally convincing. If the list includes fiction set partly or wholly in the past, it piques my particular interest in the means by which successful historical novels produce an impression of linguistic authenticity.

Here I’ll comment on three examples: Amanda Curtin’s Elemental (shortlisted for the forthcoming WA Premier’s Literary Award), Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (on the Booker’s current long list), and Jim Crace’s Harvest (shortlisted last year for the Booker, unlucky not to win it).

There’s usually a good deal of historical research behind any novel set in bygone times. Some of this may involve painstaking work on various circumstantial matters, though the writer should beware of clogging the story with intrusive references to ‘a surfeit of period detail’. That phrase is from an essay by Francine Prose in The New York Review of Books, which goes on to say that readers don’t want to be ‘distracted by expository passages that emit the dusty aura of the research library as we encounter an accumulation of costumes and customs.’

In any case, preparatory research undertaken by the best writers of historical fiction goes well beyond any checking of facts and fossicking for bits of local colour. Especially important is the challenge of creating a language that achieves verisimilitude – the semblance of reality. It’s no easy matter to persuade your readers that your narrative medium is rendering accurately how people spoke and wrote in your chosen period and place. The writing must seem to embody their characteristic turns of phrase, their conversational habits, the structure of their sentences – not only to avoid anachronism but also to gain an insight into the way they thought and felt, which would sometimes have been different from what we’re used to today. So meticulous attention to language isn’t pedantic in novels of this kind – it’s vital for credibility. But it needs to be done in a manner that avoids weighing down the story and slowing down the reader. 

Elemental_cover_bf19043a-46da-48fe-aa31-e0bd8a12c601_largeIn a previous blog post on highlights of my reading from last year, I commented that Amanda Curtin’s Elemental gains much of its enduring power from the skilful way in which it uses language to bring patterns of history and geography alive, especially ‘from the sustained and marvellously individualised narrating voice of its main character, Meggie Tulloch.’ This novel follows the ups and downs of Meggie’s life from her childhood years in the early 20th century, when she learns to work as a ‘gutting girl’ in small harsh communities of fisherfolk, first in northern Scotland and then in the Shetlands. This setting poses technical problems for the novelist because the idiom of those communities was full of words unfamiliar to most modern readers, but Amanda Curtin’s achievement is to carry the reader along without needing to depend unduly on the dialect glossary at the end of the book. She does this partly through clever use of contextual clues, judicious repetition and a knack of incorporating nuances of meaning into the sentence rhythms themselves.

wake cover_illustrationI haven’t yet read Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake except for a brief excerpt available online as part of the extensive publicity engendered by this innovative novel. You can look at the sample and the author’s accompanying comments here. If you do so, it’s immediately obvious that what Kingsnorth does is to devise a modified form of Anglo-Saxon speech as a vehicle for his narrator – an invented idiom that sits somewhere between our own modern English and the actual language of eleventh-century England. ‘The result’, he says, ‘is a book which is written in a tongue that no one has ever spoken, but which is intended to project a ghost image of the speech patterns of a long-dead land: a place at once alien and familiar.’

It’s an admirably bold experiment, though it carries two risks. Some readers may reject its homemade language as too opaque to be worth the effort of deciphering, while others (especially purist Anglo-Saxon scholars) may regard it as just a travesty of genuine Old English.

Jim-Crace-HarvestIn Harvest Jim Crace has devised something different from historical fiction of the usual kind. Factual precision is plainly not his purpose; rather, the authenticity lies in a truthful adherence to timeless human feelings. Nowhere does the novel specify the period or location in which its action occurs. Some features suggest the midlands in the Elizabethan (Shakespearean) era, but one could imagine it taking place any time during the centuries-long process of enclosing the English countryside, when peasants were forced to relinquish their traditional crop fields and small-scale village life so that sheep farmers could acquire expanses of profitable pasture land. In one sense the historical aspects of the story are as applicable to our own time as to any era, because ‘small farmers all over the world are still being forced from their lands’, as Crace remarks in an interview.

In another sense his story reaches towards elegiac myth, evoking the values of a lost community. It creates an almost hypnotic effect of nostalgia by selectively embedding archaic turns of phrase within highly stylised language that often develops a strong metrical beat. Occasionally this gives passages the regular rhythm of iambic pentameter (te-tum te-tum te-tum te-tum te-tum). In fact Crace’s prose can typically sound like the blank verse of Shakespeare or Milton or Wordsworth. Here are a few examples, mainly of sentence-length ‘lines’:

‘The village is aflame, but not with fire.’  ‘We’re drinking ale from last year’s barley crop.’  ‘We ought to be content. The harvest’s in.’  ‘Tonight there is no moon in view, of course.’  ‘As yet, there’s not the slightest trace of wind / to take the rain away and irrigate / our distant neighbours’ lands instead of ours.’  ‘Already it is bright and hot enough / for us to shelter under rye-straw hats. / We all feel harvest-worn to some degree…’  ‘The village has been freckled by the chaff.’

To my mind the patterning of this novel’s language suggests metaphorically the slow, steady pulse of peasant life – its diurnal and seasonal rhythms, the ploughing of even furrows, the regular recurrence of seeding and harvesting.

I’m particularly conscious of the challenges of creating seemingly authentic language in historical fiction because my own next novel, scheduled for release next year, tries to incorporate into its passages of dialogue and interior monologue a credible impression of mid-19th century phrasing. In its early chapters, before the action moves to Australia, it also draws on some regional English dialects, inflected by working-class usage. Doing this in a way that avoids a heavy-handed display of linguistic markers takes a fair bit of care, so I hope the outcome will carry conviction for readers.

 

Reading Like a Writer

Reading, Teaching, ,

Reading Like a WriterDuring an exchange of comments following one of my recent posts on ‘Residues of Reading‘, I mentioned a stimulating book by Francine Prose (yes, that’s her real name!), and I’d now like to tell you a bit more about it.

The author, a New Yorker, has written twenty works of fiction and is also well known as a biographer, critic, essayist, and teacher of literature and creative writing. Near the beginning of Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, Francine Prose records in these words an uncomfortable insight that came to her after some years as a classroom teacher who’d begun by seeing her role as a ‘cheerleader for literature’:

I liked my students, who were often so eager, bright and enthusiastic that it took me years to notice how much trouble they had in reading a fairly simple short story. Almost simultaneously I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to the language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical, and often negative opinions…. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural and class backgrounds…. No wonder my students found it so stressful to read!

So she changed the way she taught. There would be no more general discussions of character and plot and half-baked readers’ opinions. Instead she made it her practice to begin at the beginning and work very gradually through a text with her students. This meant lingering over phrases, considering the effect of sentence structure, and so on.

Her book shows how important it is for a student (or any reader) to slow down and scrutinise the texture of the writing – noticing the subtle nuances evoked by an author’s selection of one particular word rather than another, the different ways in which a sequence of clauses can unfurl their meanings, the significant details of paragraphing, the implications of a chosen narrative point of view, and so on.

EinA coverI’ve adapted those summary remarks above from an article written last year for English in Australia in which I recommended Prose’s book and discussed similar approaches to teaching literature in  Australian school classrooms.

The practical emphasis that I wanted to endorse is on developing students’ sensitivity to connotations of language through close observation of short fictional texts, so that they can become confident about moving from the particular to the general.

(For an excerpt from my article, click on the cover image at left .)

Back to Prose’s book. Reading Like a Writer appeals to me for several related reasons. One is that it pursues its argument through a series of persuasive examples of close reading. Francine Prose astutely analyses a wide range of passages from various fiction writers, including famous names  – Austen, Chekhov, Dickens, Nabokov, Babel, Mansfield, Kleist, Beckett and others…along with several I hadn’t encountered before. Her commentary has ignited or re-ignited my enthusiasm for many stories.

Another thing I like about this book is that it affirms the value of reading heedfully. Although I can absorb a newspaper article in quick time, when it comes to serious fiction my habit has always been slow-motion perusal. I enjoy pausing and re-reading to savour the rhythm of a sentence, question the choice of this or that word, or think about the way a chapter has been constructed. So I applaud Prose’s advocacy of unhurried pacing.

A third virtue of Reading Like a Writer is that its illuminating observations about narrative technique are valuable for those of us who practice or teach or study creative writing. Nobody can write well without learning to read well. The two activities are symbiotic. As writers we hope to find readers who will re-enact something of our creative process by looking up reflectively from the page – as we ourselves do when we shape it – and looking back attentively again, letting the language do its intricate work.

In The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller) Roland Barthes says, ‘What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I look up, I dip in again.’ He adds that a text is most pleasurable ‘if, reading it, I am led to look up often.’ 

Now that’s reading like a writer.