As it turned out, the time wasn’t right for big projects, but when I finally sat down to write again, I found that my mind had been quite active. I hadn’t read my book on history nor done any background-reading, but I had some reflexions to add on the historic “mindset”.
I found out WHY the concept is so eminently useful writing my last post. It has something to do with what I am actually doing when I am reading historic fiction - that is, fiction written at a former time as well as contemporary fiction with a historic angle. I am CHANGING my mindset to get into the text. Which means that I am looking for the mindset that might fit, making suppositions about what people at the time were actually thinking and feeling, what their lives might have been about. In my terminology it is a text vortex – an activity that reading fiction makes me engage in and which I enjoy. At least that’s the theory …
Usually, “historic” refers to some remote period, like the Viking or Elizabethan Age, but not necessarily. I just had a very strong and odd “historic” reaction watching “It’s a Sin” - which I actually got on DVD only months after it had been on British TV!!! I was so pleased … until I had to get off it somewhere during the third episode. This is horrible, I don’t want to watch it … Good! I know this is usually a sign of something special going on, as this was certainly not due to this five-part drama about young gay men coming out in London in the 80s and the rising of the “gay disease” being so bad. On the contrary! I realized that I don’t remember having felt something so SPECIFIC about a fictional text for a long time. This makes it virtually impossible to describe what I felt because there isn’t anything to compare … It sits there like this singular, solid emotional object with a sticky surface gluing me to the text. I keep going back to it when I am not watching, wanting to get away from it at the same time … Naturally, one cannot get “into” such an emotional object, dismantle it to see what it is made of. Why should I feel anything so personal anyway, having never been part of a gay community or known anybody who died of AIDS? (I had even kind of forgotten that it was called this before it became HIV. If anybody refers to it nowadays, it’s always the virus, never the disease. “We” made stunning progress, no doubt, in more than a medical sense, dealing with the disease, but we also made a neat job of forgetting …) Thinking hard about it, though, I found some kind of explanation for how this emotional object might have been created. Why it is so specific and persistent – the “gluey” bit might even partly be some weird survivor’s guilt?
The clue I found was that I had noticed a year mentioned at the beginning: 1984. It was the year I got discharged from college and into life. And I think this coincidence “pinned” me to the story for good – despite myself. Yes, it is MY generation, and, under entirely different circumstances, I had felt “the same”. There had been a time when the world was suddenly full of choices where there had been none before, a sudden, scary lack of boundaries, a hunger for life … and then IT SUDDENLY ENDED. And I realized that I had been aware of the specific and significant role AIDS had played in this outcome. It was not the comforting kind of knowledge. You never notice when something actually changes, but I think it was already during the 90s that I stopped seeing gay couples holding hands in the street. That people stopped enjoying to be seen, to be “out”, and everything “personal” moved from the public space into the home, or specific “holes”, or the anonymity of the internet. If I change, for example, into a Viking mindset - or am trying to - it is much more fun BECAUSE I haven’t been there. Getting back to the late 80s, I didn’t even have to TRY. But even though “Viking” seems much less personal and more fun, there is ultimately the same reason for playing this game. Why I never stop playing it even when it makes me feel gutted. (I hate this word, that’s why I am using it here!) I want some kind of explanation about why IT HAS ALL TURNED OUT LIKE THIS. How “we” have become who we are. Why society works the way it does. I became interested in the Vikings because they were so different but also because I felt this odd kind of kinship. In some way I still have to understand, they are part of MY past. Establishing that it is HISTORY - not fantasy – appears to play a crucial part in finding these explanations.
Even though the concept of a historic mindset is so useful, it cannot be taken literally. In reality, there are not just no “periods”, there is no mindset either that applies to any given century, or decade, or whatever stretch of time we might be looking at. Even if there was something like a common denominator of billions of mindsets of billions of different people, we know well that there is not. Just looking at my own social environment, I am aware that there are at least three different generations around, with completely different mindsets. I like to talk to the younger generation – my numerous nephews and nieces, now mostly grown-up or growing up – but I don’t pretend to understand what any of their lives are about. We are even partly watching or reading the same stuff – like “Sherlock” (5 of us), “Harry Potter” (5), the Tolkien books and films of course (6), ”Doctor Who” (3), “Vikings” (2), even “Hannibal” (2) – but in fact I have no idea why they are watching it. I might just try harder to understand them, or might live in the same household – but I doubt my parents had much of a clue what was going on inside MY life at the time. I think we just live in this delusion that there is a “ruling” mindset which we are a part of, but the pandemic showed me how much of a delusion this actually is. Why we think we understand each other is mostly because we have learned to avoid MOST topics. It’s not just chit-chat – I hate that! – but there is a lot I don’t talk about with many people. The threads that tie my thoughts and experiences to those of others are as flimsy as the threads of a spider’s web. They are also, in a way that will become relevant, equally STRONG. There IS in fact something like a RULING mindset – though not as an empirical object that could be investigated but rather as a feature of communication. What unifies “us” is that we know what we care for and are up against. This is where the idea of a mindset becomes most interesting, in my opinion: as part of the “battlefield”.
This takes a bit of explaining, and I found a wonderful introduction listening to a podcast from the BBC Radio 4 series “Sideways” which engages in one of my own favourite occupations: to look at things from a different angle. In this case, Joe Henrich, a Canadian anthropologist studying the Mapuche culture in the nineties, ended up finding out something important about his own: that WE are all WEIRDOS. And, after just a moment of resistance, I discovered that I profoundly agree. “We” – as members of a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic society – are WEIRD, not because we are abnormal, but because we are really such a MINORITY. A minority that persists in thinking they are ruling the world, which is a delusion. One that has been overwhelmingly successful, no doubt, but still mostly a delusion.
I found I also agreed with the weird answer to the question WHY we turned out WEIRD. It is because, at one point in European history, “we” started to marry for LOVE. The explanation is so convincing because it is about something “everybody” knows. We are aware that our concept of love is the weirdest thing, obviously so essential to our happiness that there is no point in trying to avoid it – I thought I had succeeded for about fifteen years, and it came back with a vengeance! – and, on the whole, such a major source of unhappiness. For people like me, who feel better with a historic explanation: there is a reason why love became such a big thing. At some point in our history, it became the ultimate tool for tearing the structure of society apart and creating a new one which “we” (weirdos) now live in. A society where creativity and competitiveness are king, and family - or other - ties suspicious.
I always like the bit where I discover that I have been wrong: that what I used to think of as boringly antiquated turnes out to have been breathtakingly modern at the time, and a real motor of change. In this case it is Christianity. In many unexpected ways "we" are so much more Christian and "medieval" than we think. 😏 There has always been love, I am sure of that, but Christianity turned it into this instrument of change, this revolutionary concept. The pre-Christian idea and reality of sexuality was that the bodies of every member of a household literally belonged to the head of this household – the legal basis of a paternalistic society. The Christian religion turned this idea over by re-defining the relationship of Christ and his church as a mutual one. Christ chose his church, but “we”, as her members, also have to actively choose him. People like my patron saint, Saint Barbara, probably became role models. She was a Roman who secretly became a Christian, and, as it was the custom, got assigned a husband but refused to marry. She was put to death as a result – which I don’t think was the customary way to resolve this kind of fix. It was because she had to reveal her faith – and then it became political, her father being a Roman general. I always rather disliked martyrs, nonetheless I always kind of admired her for her stamina. I think I even claimed her as a patron for being stubborn, not really knowing how right I was. It probably took some time to become effective, but at some point people started to apply this idea of mutual choice to sexual relationships, and that’s how it became so over-inflated.
This historic battle still appeared to have been in full swing in Europa around the Elizabethan Age - probably one reason why it was such a great time for drama: so many of these battles going on. The example used in the podcast was “Romeo and Juliet” – obviously, one would think. In fact I never spotted what is the most exciting bit about this drama from a historic point of view. I might have, if I had read the literature, but I doubt it. I would probably not have grasped the dramatic impact of the information, I had to look “sideways”. I realized, though, that I had already begun to ask the right question, wondering why, in “Shakespeare”, mothers are always so weak and fathers so horrible …
This is the part where I’d like to stress a generality that is nonetheless really important. People and relationships in fiction are very seldom a direct reflexion of historic reality or experience. They are much more often a statement about the “battlefield” – establishing what people and circumstances SHOULD or SHOULD NOT be. In fact, I have grown up more inside paternalistic structures than outside of them. (The ironic thing is that the Catholic church, which effectively ruled the part of Germany I have grown up in, has never outgrown paternalism.) But my experience about parents – mine and in general – has been nothing like this. I am sure that fathers were a constructive rather than destructive factor in the socialization of their offspring as often as not in the Elizabethan Age, and mothers a point of security and unconditional acceptance for their children to fall back on when they most needed it. Stressing parental weakness like this is due to the DRAMATIC form – a reflexion of the battle already going on. Paternalism is failing, the modern, “weird” society beginning to form …
It is nice that I can have a go at Shakespeare again, it wasn’t even intended. And there is more! Writing this, I remembered a point of discussion about “Troilus and Cressida” between Claudia and me. She found it weird that Troilus gives up Cressida when his family demands it without even putting up a fight. And I couldn’t find the motives for Cressida to give up her great love just like that, jumping into bed with her captor for no apparent reason. Bearing in mind that WE are weird, I noticed that I had already changed my mindset ENOUGH to understand that Troilus is not morally deficient but Trojan = pre-Christian “non-weird” as established above. As a young male member of the Trojan ruling family, it would have been very deviant – and morally deficient! – for him to challenge paternal authority. I had been through the Vikings enough to have internalized how family-based societies work.
This is further proof, by the way, that the GENERAL assumption of literary historians that pre-modern authors had no sense of history and only wrote from a contemporary point of view is WRONG! Reading “Coriolanus”, “Titus Andronicus”, and “Julius Caesar”, it intrigued me to find what a great historian Shakespeare was, how interested he was in Roman society and in what these people might have been feeling and thinking. (It is quite legitimate, though, for US to be more interested in the Elizabethan content of his plays – but then this is something WE are doing.) I felt that he had a historic interest in the “Iliad” as well, reading it myself, though he modernized the story ruthlessly, stripping his characters of every trace of “heroism”. But there were these family-based structures and the adherent moral values of Troilus that he kept. Now I have come to the point where having looked into BOTH of his main sources for the play definitely pays. As antiquated and boring as it admittedly had appeared to me, the Troilus of Chaucer’s “Troilus and Cryseyde” agonizing over his love must still have felt strikingly modern to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. As Claudia informed me, there had been a modernized edition, and this was certainly because people were READING this! I suppose mostly MEN. (This is conjecture, but I cannot imagine that a lot of women, IF they learned to read, got allowed more than their prayer book.) Here my questions about Cressida’s motives began to be answered. At the time, romantic or “courtly” love was mostly for men. THEY did the choosing, and the woman was well advised to be shrewd and keep them at arm’s length, and put their love to the acid test – as Cressida does! She is no dimwit, and I know now why I found it convincing to see her as a streetwise, practical young woman on the stage in the RSC’s production who isn’t likely to lose her head over love – as Troilus does! The focus is on him, not only in Chaucer’s poem – which doesn’t care a fig about Cressida’s suffering or motives! - but also in Shakespeare’s play, for a – historic! – reason. He is the character in whom Shakespeare’s two sources for the play coincide, which makes him sit exactly on the battle-line between a pre-modern paternalistic ideal of living and a modern, love-based one. Cressida instead – and here I cannot help but feel that, in the gap, Shakespeare is telling a bit of covert feminist history just by having her right! – is not affected by this battle. In fact, for women, never having been part of the hierarchy of power, it has always been the same. As I was compelled to acknowledge reading the “Iliad”, women in fact belonged to the head of the household and therefore had the same legal status as slaves, without any hope of outgrowing it. Cressida cannot afford to be “romantic”, she has to be practical and adapt to the situation, looking for whatever she can do to take control. (The scene where she is “welcomed” into the Greek camp on her arrival has been one of the most fascinating and disturbing for me when I read it.) Being clever, she is aware of Troilus’ delusion who probably thinks of further sexual encounters in pursuing their relationship. For him it is unthinkable to give up his “romantic” choice, once it is made, but there is no way he will ever be able to marry her.
I think this example covers exactly the way I use “history” in reading fiction. As a means of making it more dramatic and available, getting excited by the battle and trying to establish where the battle-lines might have been. I think we really get a chance of seeing – and feeling! – them because there are rules and conventions for a certain fictional form that makes it ideal for the purpose, like drama, or tragedy for “staging” battles – or, inside them, conventions of making us focus on certain characters and their predicaments and reacting to them. “We” are getting excited about what people got excited about at the time. This is how I learn history reading historic fiction instead of trying to understand historic fiction by reading history.
As this, unfortunately, already is some kind of final conclusion, my investigation might end here. But I am not really satisfied with being so vague about the concept of history that is behind all this. I hope this dissatisfaction will motivate me to look into it some more.