Tea at Trianon: Academic Hostility

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, June 5, 2017

Academic Hostility

I have never understood why some college professors are so threatened by historical fiction writers. From The Guardian:

History is, of course, an interpretation of the past, and this is as true for nonfiction as it is for fiction. The difference lies in the addition of fabrication to mould a story. While the historian might posit a theory, the novelist can (often controversially) place that theory at the heart of a narrative without having to explain.

Yet it is precisely exactly these imaginative leaps that can bring the past so vibrantly to life, enabling a reader to enter the conscious (as the novelist imagines it) of people long gone. I will never forget the revulsion I felt at the description of cannibalism in Child 44; the thrill of reading Robert Graves’s I, Claudius for the first time; and the horror of the bomb crater in Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, “The machine guns found them, they rippled, like corn through which the wind is passing. Jack thought of meat, the smell of it.

Historical fiction also has a silent, soft power that is often unacknowledged. Writing about the influence of Pat Barker’s 1990s Regeneration trilogy, the historian Tracey Loughran claimed: “All major histories of shell shock published since the mid-1990s have made reference (favourable, critical, or simply thoughtful) to Barker’s novel.” Antony Beevor claims to have started “as a boy with Hornblower and Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories”.

Simon Schama has cited The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa as being one of his favourite works of fiction. Margaret MacMillan cited the novel The Noise of Time as one of her favourite books of 2016 precisely because Julian Barnes “goes where we historians dare not go – into the innermost thoughts, fears and hopes of a real figure from the past”. (Read more.)