Today please welcome Rachel of the blog Bookishly Witty! Rachel is going to attempt to get you to read an author most frown at the thought of reading. She just might succeed! Check it out:
Guess the following author:
He was a successful poet before embarking on a sweeping
literary project that spanned many volumes. He drew on such sources as
Shakespeare's plays and medieval and Renaissance verse and romance for inspiration
and insight. And he changed the way we think about "The Novel"
forever.
That's right, I'm talking about Sir Walter Scott
(1771-1832). Now, whenever I mention this name, there's bound to be someone
within earshot who rolls the eyes and sighs "booooooooooring," or
looks confused and says, "hrnhh?" And to be honest, both of
these reactions pain me, pain me deeply. For Scott didn't just write a
few books about Scotland, based on some old tales and historical scraps. No indeed.
He gave us a detailed, imaginative chronicle of a people that transcends time
and space. In the characters of the Waverley novels, we see those fears
and desires that drive people around the world to reach back into the past for
a sense of community, which tends to get lost in the chaos of swift
technological and social change, especially in the 19th century. And it is for
these (and many more) reasons that Scott had such a profound influence on such
writers as Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot.
But what, after all, is historical fiction? At first
glance, it is simply the blending of historical events and fictional narrative.
Since no one can really know what a former time-period was like, though, we
must guess at the thoughts and feelings of historical figures, from queens and
innkeepers to lawyers and artists. When a writer chooses, for instance, to
write a story about a past event or person, they must decide how much liberty
to take with the subject matter. After all, inhabiting a famous person's brain
and making them say things of which there's no record takes courage and
imagination.
We see this in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon
(1999), in which such towering historical figures as Alan Turing and Douglas
MacArthur are made to speak and interact with fictional characters, all in the
service of Stephenson's story about encryption and codes during WWII and our
own time. Ultimately, writers like Stephenson, James Michener, Geraldine
Brooks, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others ask us to acknowledge that, no matter
how objective-sounding and fact-filled a history textbook might be, it can
never truly express all facets of life during a time-period far removed from our
own. We might learn who fought in which battle, but only the historical novel
can take us into the minds of specific soldiers or enable us to feel like
participants in a certain historical moment.
But back to good ol' Walter Scott. How did I become so
interested in him? Well, we were assigned
Ivanhoe in middle school, and
I read it without understanding much of it, but it stayed with me. I tried
again in high school, and enjoyed the frank, energetic prose that marks Scott's
style. I was also intrigued by the fact that Scott dealt with such issues as
the plight of Jews in 12th-century England in a work otherwise focused on the
monarchy and shifting political allegiances.
And then...while at my
in-laws' house several years ago,
I noticed a beautiful collected edition of
Scott's works (over 40 volumes)- you know, the kind that was published a century
or so ago, with delicate pen-and-ink illustrations sprinkled throughout. I
guess my jaw was kind of scraping the ground, because my in-laws wound up
giving me the entire collection when they were doing some spring cleaning. They
knew I would read it, and it would have a home amongst my hundreds of other
well-loved and cherished books. And they were right.
Scott's tales of Highlanders, doomed lovers, and monarchs
set within their specific historical contexts (and with appropriate dialect)
have provided a powerful blueprint for how a historical novel might be crafted.
His Bride of Lammermoor was even turned into an opera, which in turn was
worked into various late-19th-century American novels interested in questions
of class, culture, and art. Scott's extensive knowledge of literary forms,
classic texts, and the history of his own people inspired him to launch a new
kind of novel. So, off you go- grab yourself a copy of a Scott novel, if you've
never read him before. And enjoy.
