Fiction as a Vessel For Historical Memory

January 22, 2010

As I become more familiar with the best and brightest emerging writers and writing on the indie lit scene, I notice that an astonishing percent of fiction takes place in the present. And not just the present, but the immediate present (Right now, in my apartment, in my head, in the moment.) There’s nothing wrong with this, and the immediacy of the writing tends to provoke an intense emotional response, no doubt. Much of it is brilliant and vivid.

But at the same time, I worry that not enough new writers are remembering our history for us. Yes, we have more than our share of hacks writing historical fiction, but that’s not what I mean. I’m thinking specifically of writers like Jim Shepard, who often write literary fiction about the past, about historical moments that evoke a sense of continuity and shared history, a timeline we know and can learn from as well as the commonality of human experience. I know as a writer I find it almost morally necessary to write about history, and as a reader I seek it out hungrily but can find very little of it.

I think this might be a problem for my generation. After all, Huxley said years ago that “that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” And more recently, historian Tony Judt wrote that “we live in an age of forgetting.” It’s important that we remember, and that we learn from the lessons of history. So, what if they weren’t lessons? What if fiction, in its subtle, entertaining way, could preserve memory and help us learn from it in a way history lessons could not? Look at works like Slaughterhouse Five–if not for Vonnegut’s classic, how many readers would be aware of the Dresden firebombings? Few enough people can recall our last ten presidents, let alone the less recent or even far flung past.

Fiction is a witness, is a vessel for our collective, historical memory. It’s just one of many, and needn’t shoulder that responsibility by itself. And some writers’ genius lends itself much more to writing of contemporary times and troubles than of the past, for certain. And hey, maybe I’m missing a whole bunch of amazing writers who’ve done fiction on history. I hope so. I want to read more of them. Because in an “age of forgetting,” when we forget what happened four years ago, let alone four decades ago, we desperately need to learn to remember. And to remember to learn.