February 4, 2007
Fictions of History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST Wisdom about the logic of history shows up in odd places. Kim Newman is a British writer of genre fiction, as well as the author of somewhat scholarly books for the British Film Institute. His fiction can be difficult to describe, because while some of it falls within a specific genre, he is celebrated for dexterously mixing different pop cultural genres in fascinating ways. A collection of linked alternate history stories, Back In The USSA, imagined the history of a Communist United States (with Al Capone as our Stalin) and then refracted that fantasy through a variety of genre optics, with homages to John Steinbeck, Apocalypse Now, Jack Kerouac, Buddy Holly, and a number of other American icons. A horror novel modeled Senator Joe McCarthy as a demon living off the pain and humiliation of a blacklisted writer, a vampire series set novels in the World War I Royal Flying Corps and Fellini’s Rome, and so on. Meldings of different pop genres, once simply called crossover fiction, are now more portentously described as post-modernist, but they can still be very diverting. A recent collection of Newman’s short stories, The Man From The Diogenes Club, while a far cry from his best work, does lead off with an interesting tale: In the early 1970s a number of former World War II veterans, not unreasonably disgusted with various aspects of the United Kingdom of their time, cast a spell to bring back what they most fondly remember of the Second World War to their village on the south coast. They succeed in getting back the social solidarity of wartime, at the unanticipated price of bringing back versions of Hitler and Mussolini. Newman’s point, simple and I think wise, is that historical nostalgia tends to present idealized and very selective visions of the past. He is also arguing, more darkly, that some precious things come at a very stiff price. For example you cannot get wartime solidarity without a war. This repeats a lesson of a play I saw the other night, a revival of Brian Friel’s 1981 Translations. Friel is a splendid contemporary Irish playwright, and Translations, set in an Irish village where British engineers are beginning the Ordnance Survey mapping of the United Kingdom, is a complicated play, but it includes a couple of insights that parallel Newman’s. The most subtle and bitter, I think, is that the beauty and intricacy of pre-industrial Irish culture, which is mourned and celebrated throughout the play, came at the price of hideous vulnerability: The great famine is just around the corner. Another insight is that the gentlemen who officered the nineteenth-century British army, simultaneously colorful and vastly impressive, and sometimes charming, maintained imperial order by significant and cruel repression. The intersection of those lessons may suggest that the imperial order destroyed much that was beautiful and irreplaceable, and in the course of doing so abolished the specter of famine. So nothing is free. History pairs its offerings to us, and we are not likely to get any great advance without a price, often a very harsh one.
|
