Humanity and the Historical

By Brian Trent

“Time is the stream I go a-fishin’ in.”

- Henry David Thoreau

It was the face of someone’s grandfather perhaps, stamped with a roadmap of wrinkles that were earned like battle-scars from a lifetime of experience. The tightly-cropped curls of his head showed signs of a receding hairline, and there was a gentle nobility in the mouth suggesting this was a man who was approachable, who listened more than he spoke, and who was never smug about his wealthy life.

I remember that face with perfect clarity. It’s a marble bust from two thousand years ago. I came face-to-face with it at a New York museum while I was a college student. The paintings, tapestries, and monuments I had seen failed to make an impression to equal this lone bust of a Roman patrician whose name is lost for all time.

That was the moment when historical fiction chose me. I still see his face sometimes, staring as if cognizant of another human being across so many centuries.

For that is the first lesson of historical fiction: Human nature is a constant that is instantly recognizable, regardless of the time period. The props may change, the costumes vary, the music alters, but human nature stays precisely the same.

Consider the Greek soldier in the midst of battle. The sunny day is almost a mockery of the wild terror in his heart, and he crouches beside fallen comrades as Persian arrows whistle by his head, and he pleads with his god to bring him safely through this nightmare so he can see his beloved wife and daughter again.

The emotions he feels, this fundamental cry of survival, is no different from the 21 st century American soldier who crouches beside a fallen comrade while bullets hiss over his head, all the while praying to his god to bring him safely back to his beloved wife and daughter.

It is this humanism which is like a stream, to use Thoreau’s metaphor. And that stream has flowed since the white glaciers razed our leafy canopies and forced us to the ground, where we tried to make a living in the tall grasses of the Savannah.

A historical fiction novelist just needs to follow it.

Where that stream goes, of course, is to an exotic landscape. Science-fiction writers often take us to alien worlds; historical writers turn their time machines the other way, and go exploring the numerous beachheads offered by more than five thousand years of recorded history. And though it is exotic – after all, that’s a big part of the joy – it’s not just about the flashy props or landscapes.

Take the wild west frontier, for instance. The props may include boomtowns, saloons, six-shooters and tumbleweeds, but the clever historical writer digs deeper. Phrases that we know so well – like “jerkwater towns” and asking for a “shot” of whiskey have their origin in this time period. Our language itself is an amalgamation of earlier slang. Exploring their genesis breathes special life into your story. The rugged traveler who just arrived in town heads to the saloon to buy a drink… but having no money, he trades a bullet for a “shot.” The reader, confronted with this, lets out a quiet gasp of delight and makes the humanistic connection.

Sometimes it can be even more subtle. For a novel I wrote about China’s first emperor, I consciously made the choice to use the old spelling of his particular dynasty: Ch’in, instead of the one most historians tend to inexplicably favor, the Qin. Why? Because modern China derives its name from that word, and the older way of rendering it into Romanized letters helps bring across this connection better. (We don’t write the name of the country Qina, after all!)

This process – of enriching your story through these kinds of details – educates the readers without becoming tedious, and it drives home the point that what you’re writing is essentially the story of how we got to today. No matter what the terrain, the historical writer finds the human footsteps in it.

Consider this fictional snippet about a European explorer in India:

Randall lost himself in the mysterious rainforest. He knew the dense jungle was filled with poisonous snakes, diseases, and beasts Europe had yet to name.

And now this:

Randall lost himself in the mysterious jungle. The word itself was taken from the native tongue – jangala. Somehow, that was more appropriate. It came out like tribal drums, hinting at the poisonous snakes, diseases, and beasts Europe had yet to name.

The first passage misses a prime opportunity to immerse the readership in an interesting cultural detail. By introducing it in the revised passage, we make a connection between our readers and the world of India. They will never look at the word “jungle” the same way again. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “Man’s mind, when stretched to a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

It also gets us closer to Randall as he pushes deeper into the unknown.

 

* * *

 A historical writer’s main job is to do research, of course. I like to view it as passing into layers of a time period: the food, politics, clothing, history, religions, and even language. Like an artist’s palette of colors, these details are then at the writer’s disposal. But the canvas she paints on is the human soul.

 There’s an exercise I do once I’ve absorbed a great deal of research about a particular time period. From the moment I wake up, I play a game in which I imagine what my life would be like if I were living “back then.” What would I be eating for breakfast? What would my daily schedule consist of? What would I believe in?

 That latter point is important, because while human nature doesn’t change, the values of a given society do. The Victorian gentleman dressed in impeccable clothes of the latest fashion while consulting his pocket-watch, is no less a sexual creature than earlier men. And though his culture condemns sexual impulse, it doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there… hence, the scores of gentleman whose late-night walks included detours into Whitechapel district.

 This is an easy mistake for novice writers to make. Historical details and events are the flashy exterior; a keen understanding of humanity is the core. It is this understanding which gives historical fiction its pulse… something which most straightforward history books fail to.

Because let’s face it: We have no machine to allow us a peak into what it was really like in December of 1777, when George Washington and his army camped at Valley Forge. We can research the details of how many people and animals died in those frigid temperatures, how soldiers subsisted on flour-and-water paste to survive, and the shopping-list of diseases which plagued them. These details can be interesting, but they must be dressed upon a humanistic frame. You might be starving in that frozen valley, but at what point does a meal of pasty flour make you retch? And if you do vomit, consider what desperation and a burning need for survival may force you to do.

Pulp historicals don’t bother with unpleasant details, nor do they have to. The dime-store novelists were often content to tell simple adventure tales that used time periods like the backdrops at community theater. A pirate adventure reads like a Western adventure reads like an Oriental adventure.

A serious historical writer develops the understanding that the strength of his genre is the interplay between detail and human nature. If I were a Viking, I might look forward to raping and pillaging a Saxon village. I know they’re weaker than me, and they have things that I want: food, women, mead. What’s more, the thrill of the attack itself makes life worth living to me. I don’t have basketball courts or treadmills to work off my energy. I know nothing of life’s other thrills: Reading a book, learning a theorem, or watching a play. Here in the chilly hinterlands, life is short and cruel. When pleasures are available, you take them.

How sympathetic you want to make such a character is up to you. Our Viking is likely neither hero nor villain, but he is someone we can understand (even if we would rather distance ourselves from him.) Just like the Victorian gentleman who can rant about morality and then, a couple hours later, join Dorien Grey in a smoky backroom for illicit activities, so too is the Viking within us.

Perhaps the best example of humanistic connections can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I used as the basis of my novel Never Grow Old. Here is a cultural setting in the Bronze Age, where the props are animal skins and chariots and blood sacrifice. And what are the themes? Friendship. Loss. Fear of death. Gilgamesh might be deemed a god on Earth, and he might rule with absolute authority over his city, but he is still a human being with the innate concerns we all carry. Thousands of years later, Alexander the Great was shot in the thigh with an arrow during a battle, and while the wound ran one of his companions pointed and said, “My Lord! Your divine ichor doth flow!” To which an angry Alexander snapped, “No, that’s blood.”

In fact, many of the emotional issues and neuroses we deal with today may well owe to millennia of human nature being forced into a new, more civilized society. For most of history, it was advantageous to be violent; civilization wasn’t founded by peaceful berry-pluckers, after all. It’s a worthwhile reflection.

A few months ago, I was having dinner with a friend who disagreed that people were essentially the same as yesteryear.

“We don’t have gladiator games anymore,” she told me. This, while the Super Bowl was playing on the TV behind her.

The historical novelist recognizes that the only thing separating a Super Bowl from a Roman arena game is the existence of laws. Boxing, WWE, and UFC championships blur the line even more.

Individuals can change, naturally. The soldier who thinks only of bloodlust can be stirred by a dramatic production from Euripedes, or by the fiery oration of Cicero. He might suddenly have his mind stretched to new dimensions, and perceive a world filled with wonders to be learned and explored.

Or not. That soldier might be the guy who skewered Archimedes, while the great thinker was drawing perfect circles in the sand. And why? Because maybe he felt the same murderous impulse that comes over us during road-rage.

I have no idea what the man behind that sculpture I saw was like. I can research how wealthy Roman citizens would sit to have their likenesses drawn, and from that drawing a sculptor would set to work on a more permanent render. I can learn what it was like running a rich villa, attending Senate, and even hopping a trireme for a grand tour of the civilized world.

But looking at that ancient face, I do know something that as a writer I can capitalize on. I know what it is to be human.

And so did he.

______________________________________________________________

Brian Trent is a historical novelist and screenwriter with a diverse background in journalism, travel, and education. His award-winning work has appeared in The Humanist (including the May/June '04 Cover Story) Writer's Digest, Elements of Literature, and World News Chronicle, and his novel Remembering Hypatia was nominated for Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. He lives in Connecticut.