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Penguin
0140183485
£5.99
Gaps.
You, the reader. A journey. Spaces between. Deserts on the page. Up to you. Reward. Beauty, but also difficulty. What gets called Modernism. T.S.Eliot. Virginia Woolf. Also, Jean Rhys:
'They said when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, 'because she pretty like pretty self' Christophine said.
'She was my father's second wife, far too young for him they thought, and , worse still, a Martinique girl. When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing now was a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed - all belonged to the past.)'
This is the opening of Wide Sargasso Sea. It gives us a huge amount of information, but wishes us to make a structure out of it for ourselves.
A geography is being established: Jamaica, Martinique, and wherever the white people come from.
A net of relations is hinted at - Christophine, though speaking Jamaican, is not one of the Jamaican ladies; yet she feels confident enough both to explain why they feel as they do and also to pass judgement on the narrator's mother.
And an orphaned narrator, observant and inquisitive, is being brought to life.
All of which is a long way away from much of the usual plod of historical fiction. This, because it is dealing with a period with which the reader has a sparser acquaintance than their own, tends to footnote itself as it goes along; Christophine would not be introduced by her name and a stray sentence. Historical fiction, very often, isn't confident enough in its world to allow the reader to make these connections for themselves.
Similarly, the reader going to historical fiction wishes to be introduced to a stranger, distant world - and, by going to historical fiction rather than history textbooks, they admit that they want some intermediary. The job of this intermediary is to make some of the decisions for them: cut the on the one hand but on the other; give, instead, a romp.
This in turn tempts the writers of historical fiction into what you might call 'bad faith'. Very roughly defined (by me, the real definition is in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness), bad faith is the knowing acceptance of weak evidence to back up an already existing belief. How this works for writers of historical fiction is simple. As they are in quest of the romp, they will take from historical textbooks all that is most romping, and ignore anything anti-romp. (For example, it's much more of a romp if Queen Elizabeth was present at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.)
Whole sub-genres are constructed upon bad faith premises. Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael crime novels reply upon the fiction that the medieval mind was capable of forensic investigation and deductive reasoning. For Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, this was all part of the joke: his monk-detective was secretly (through being written about by Eco) familiar with Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, etc.
This may seem petty. Why condemn fiction, one branch, for being fictional? The pleasure of the text remains the same: all novels are, in a sense, historical; all are written in bad faith.
And it is because the historical fiction reader knows about the bad faith, and has anticipated and welcomed it, that, two negatives making a positive, the novel ends up as a form of good faith.
Wide Sargasso Sea is undoubtedly one of the best historical novels ever written.
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