Today’s Great Contemporary Literature Is About The Past

In the 1980s and 1990s, Fredric Jameson argued that one of the many failings of contemporary historical fiction was its “omnivorous…historicism,” its “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past.” More than 20 years later, Jameson doubled down on that claim in an essay titled “The Historical Novel Today, or, Is It Still Possible?” He lamented that “the historical novel seems doomed to make arbitrary selections from the great menu of the past, so many differing and colorful segments or periods catering to the historicist taste, and all now…more or less equal in value.” Yet this critique fails to register just how selective—one might even say discerning—writers and readers have been when it comes to their appetites for history.

Though the historical settings of contemporary American fiction are as diverse as the authors who create them, a significant portion of this work falls within a highly specific constellation of historical subgenres: contemporary narratives of slavery, Holocaust fiction and the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, narratives of immigration, and the novel of recent history.

Testifying to the prominence of these individual subgenres, many notable novels in the last decade have fallen under the rubric of not one, but two or more of them. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, for example, chronicles the history of Japanese airmen during World War II, as well as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is a multigenerational novel that narrates two halves of a family tree divided by enslavement, but reunited by way of immigration two centuries later. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom is a World War II novel, a multigenerational family saga, and a novel of recent history that follows three generations of a Black family living in New Orleans from the 1940s, through the 1980s, to the period just after Hurricane Katrina.

Though it may seem odd to categorize works as various as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones under the single heading of historical fiction, this broader approach enables us to recognize the larger literary ecosystem that allows those diverse forms to flourish: Taken together, they represent a sea change in conceptions of literary prestige, and a shift in value from narratives of the way we live now to chronicles in which—to borrow from Morrison—“nothing ever dies.”

This transformation of the American literary field has been, in many ways, a salutary one. It has led to a dazzling wealth of historical narratives, fostered the careers of a new generation of American writers, and contributed to the formation of a literary canon that is markedly more inclusive than it has ever been. More important still, it has helped to reshape American historical consciousness. As historians such as Hayden White have recognized for at least half a century, our understanding of the historical past is inseparable from the structure of the stories we tell about it. The long-refuted assumption that “the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his,” White argues, overlooks both the historian’s commitment to narrative tropes and the historical novelist’s commitment to factual research.

As the writers just mentioned have demonstrated well, fiction is a powerful tool for producing historical knowledge. Historical fiction shapes our collective memory, personifies key events and periods, reveals the deeper roots of contemporary crises, unsettles neat chronologies, challenges the historical record, exposes its lies and lacunae, recovers disregarded stories, and conjures others to stand in for those that have been lost entirely. Indeed, by stimulating a critical encounter with the past, historical fiction, at its best, turns its reader into a kind of time traveler.

We are living in a golden age of historical fiction, but also a period in which the understanding it promotes is being increasingly policed. The culture and canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s not only helped to bring about American literature’s focus on the past; they also offered a kind of prologue to today’s cultural politics, where ferocious debates over which books are taught, and how, have not only resurfaced but intensified. The political proxy wars that once focused largely on university English departments have now spread to new and alarming fronts, from the public library to the high school classroom. Many of the novels discussed here—Morrison’s in particular—have already been targeted by right-wing pundits, banned by local school boards, and outlawed by state legislators. I have little doubt that more will follow.

At the same time, the sustained assault on narratives of history also emphasizes the limits of what those narratives can accomplish on their own. It may be comforting to imagine that these efforts to stymie literary culture and sanitize the historical record will someday be judged harshly by history. But that way of thinking only highlights how thoroughly historical fiction’s backward glance has come to frame contemporary politics. Understanding the past is a necessary but ultimately insufficient condition for effecting change in the present.

Over the last five decades, a number of literary institutions have inadvertently encouraged the belief that history can act as the central staging ground for issues of contemporary injustice and inequality. The Pulitzer Prize and its peers have elevated novels about the 1920s that offer comparisons with today’s ultra-rich, and stories of the ’60s that allude to today’s over-policed, but neither address the present with the unflinching gaze our moment requires. Given fiction’s extraordinary capacity to resuscitate the past, these institutions have at times mistaken historical recovery for a form of historical redress.

Thirty years ago, Toni Morrison argued in Playing in the Dark that the American literary canon had assisted in “the construction of a history and a context for whites by positing history-lessness and context-lessness for blacks.” In the decades since then, a generation of Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous writers has marshaled historical fiction as a means of rectifying this disparity, and a range of cultural organizations have consecrated those writers for doing so.

It is certainly not lost on historical novelists—or their readers—that historical fiction is always to some extent about the time in which it is written rather than set. Yet in recent years, writers have worked to highlight the limits of the easy analogy between past and present, as well as how it has become an expectation placed upon minoritized writers in particular. Take the narrator of Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, for example, whose stories of the Vietnam War and its aftermath are the product of interrogation and forced confession. As Nguyen writes in the opening lines of the novel, “I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.”

Or consider Cora, the protagonist of Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, who escapes enslavement only to find that the sole employment available to her is playing an enslaved woman in a white-owned museum. As that novel makes clear, when the only job in town is historical reenactment, representing the past can seem more like a trap than a means of getting free. As this year’s prize lists will surely attest, in the world of American literature, the past isn’t dead—it isn’t even past.