Friday from the Archives: “Writing the Great War: Ron Rash and Terry Roberts Discuss World War I, the North Carolina German Internment Camp, and the Historical Novel” an interview by Zackary Vernon in NCLR 2014
Editor’s Note: Normally, I wouldn’t just post an entire passage. However, I think what Rash and Roberts said in 2013 is even more critical today. ~DT
Zack Vernon: Do you think that obsessing over past cultural circumstances ever runs the risk of preventing us from doing difficult self-reflective cultural work in the present? In other words, the historical novel may suggest a longing for a sense of cultural exceptionalism or difference that simply does not exist anymore and
thus is not altogether relevant. In general, what do you think historical novels can do for the present? And how do you think your novel speaks to the present? What is it that you hoped your novel would communicate?
Ron Rash: There are novels that seek to take us away from the complexities of our time. Those are the kinds of novels that depict some kind of golden, Edenic place – be it Paris or the Appalachian Mountains or Tahiti or whatever. But the novels that I find most interesting represent the past so that it resonates with the present and into the future. For example, when I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which is about England during Henry VIII’s reign, I found that the subject matter of the book connects very specifically with political and cultural issues in the present. That book gave me a new way to think about the present.
I hope that The Cove conveys the idea that if we forget the lessons of the past, then we will continue to make the same mistakes. Literature communicates just how connected human beings are, even if those human beings existed in the distant past. Their ultimate concerns are concerns that we continue to have. Literature about the past can sneak up on the reader. The reader may think that the story is set in the distant past and that the characters are thinking about the world in a very different way than we do now. For example, people may think that a character like Chauncey in The Cove would not exist today, but I hope that there is a moment that they come to think that people are still like this even though it’s 2013 and not 1917. You see these kinds of people on Talk Radio or on TV or on blogs who are obsessed with being patriotic and being a good American. But, as we see in the novel, these people have the least amount to lose. They want to go to war, but it’s not them or their children who are going to be doing the fighting. They’re like Chauncey. They will not end up in body bags.
Terry Roberts: I think the best historical fiction clears away the clutter and asks us enduring questions that hold our feet to the fire here and now. In other words, the best novels set in the past hold up the mirror to us in our contemporary lives in a way that is all the more powerful. That’s the best of historical fiction. Those historical books that aren’t the best, the nine out of ten, may be entertaining or distracting, but at the end of the day they are not going to wake us up in the middle of the night and make us think about something.
I think the question at the core of A Short Time to Stay Here is a question of imprisonment and escape. Most adults, at some point in their lives, come to face the consequences of the choices they have made, whether professional or personal. You begin to see these decisions that were made more or less consciously, more or less wisely, come to imprison us. I think that A Short Time to Stay Here is a book for adults. That’s not to say that it’s overtly sexual but rather that it is about what happens in the middle part of your life. It is Dante’s “I woke one day to discover myself in a dark wood.” Stephen is right there and so is Anna, and what they’re struggling with is how to honor those good things that imprison us – such as our commitments to one another, our desire for peace, our willingness to love – and how do we escape those things out of the past that constrain and weaken and scare us.
When my son was taking AP Literature, he asked me what the dominant images or symbols are in A Short Time to Stay Here, and without thinking, I responded, “The fence and the bridge.” The fence is all those things in our lives which imprison us, and the bridge is the means by which we can escape if we choose to do so. The setting and time of the story create a nexus at which this question of imprisonment and escape becomes the novel’s heartbeat. I hope that because of this, the novel is effective in asking readers in 2013 what they will do about this question. What will we do about those things that imprison us, and what will we do about those things that free us? And that, to me, is what the best historical fiction does. I can’t make that claim for A Short Time to Stay Here, yet – I hope to be able to make that claim someday – but that is what it seeks to do.
Read the entire story online at ProQuest. Add the NCLR 2014 issue to your collection.
